Roman Holiday: DAY 4

From the infinitesimal to the infinitely great.

Today again, the Dolce Vita is fooling me. Any action takes its own time and teaches me patience. Roman minutes are not the same than anywhere else.

All the better… I like more and more being wandered throughout narrow and shadowed meanders. Brushed by ocher and leafy walls. Flown above dark and smooth grounds. Hung by my cappuccino’s bubbles. I gaze at Rome’s life across centuries. I admire Romans being their eternal city’s indifferent masters.

I embrace small viccole‘s random path, you could think it is leading you to a dead end but it actually uncovers secret passes between past and present. I visited outdoor museums on my first day, in order to know better about Empire’s ruins when I only would have to immediately got lost throughout the city. Old broken red stones, dirty and yellowish, are everywhere; they enter the most unbelievable places. Here they are, supporting Vittorio Emmanuel II’s pristine white palace. Here they are again, given on nowadays balcony and arisen as columns. Here they are still, damaged walls whose memories stand for such an ancient prestige; dirty obelisks whose hieroglyphs tell a mesmerizing story; triumphal arches whose honors has been forgotten; blended in the new architecture. It is old history encouraging new nobility, it is first history cutting first revolution; creating a seamless line in which Rome is not Impress, nor Revolutionary, nor Papal, nor Corrupt. Rome is a whole on which historical layers literally stack.
Rome is the physical and touchable memory of our universal ancestors’ heritage. Pantheons, cupolas, temples. And us? What will remain after us? What will they find in two millenniums? Gums still decomposing? Tanks full of radioactivity? And it is being optimistic, it is assuming there will still be an Earth to remember…

And I follow intertwined streets’ labyrinth finally and blindly pouring me into gigantic piazze where obelisks rise or fountains flow or both. From the infinitesimal to the infinitely great, glowing marble is suddenly shinning in the sun, massive buildings are suddenly offering their serious or luxurious walls; and you feel as tiny as you felt giant. And you feel as moved as you felt fantastic.

And as suddenly as this lightning outbreak, as I enter the sacred den, I understand why the Dolce Vita has fooled me once again. I had to be under Sant’Agnese in Agone Church’s cupola at 12.04 am.
I have been looking for my wonder for days, letting it only brushing me little by little, where I expected the least. Hidding through the most humble stones. Refusing to be offered easily and instantly in front of walls everybody admires. And here, suddenly, sparingly spread emotions overflow my heart, hit my soul, torture my throat, mesmerize my being. As my eyes almost reach upside down the fabulous cupola on which murals from another time were painted at arms’ length…
In this minute, frozen under Renaissance painter’s hanging sky, stunned by genial painted shimmering colors, the emotion of Filippo Lippi, the man of God and art who offered his heart to a nun, and the emotion of Sandro Botticelli, the artist who universally loved men and women, rule over my soul. This troubled emotion I remember feeling as I was reading their life’s novel in one of my previous ones. It was about art and love as always. Muses and Pygmalion. Freedom and breach of decorum.
And facing those unknown lifelines, something had pierced an unknow part of myself. That exact same unspoken emotion than this minute, at 12.04 am, under Sant’Agnese in Agone Church’s cupola. That same wave I absolutely need to leave here so I don’t sink in public place under majestic heavens.

I therefore run into the white sun above the infinitely great piazza, lost among the absent summer crowd, a tear stuck in my throat; to follow the infinitesimal Roman viccole towards the museum. I am deeply moved by a sensation I don’t understand, that almost doesn’t belong to me and that doesn’t leave once I am under other profanes vaults, in other pagan temples. I think this is all my hidden wonder, I think this is something beyond me. I don’t know if it is Rome or what it represents, I don’t know if it is art or what it is trying to say. I am intrigued. Touched. Upside down.

From the infinitesimal to the infinitely great, Rome definitely doesn’t go for subtleties when my soul resists or my heart plays rebel in front of its wonders.