Fleeting Wor(l)ds

White Dreams.

For a couple of days, in a – vain, since I have to go with a mask anyway – attempt to escape the heat, I take shelter in the museums’ marbled coolness. Or should I say Palaces? For they are true princess castles that, besides being living proof of endless Time and Art, enclose Roman luxurious memories and – how my romantic spirit would resist? – travel me to fantastic forgotten dreams.

I walk above old and smooth tiles, black on white or sometimes pinked striped. And I am utterly moved. Thrown in a silky world where togas fly, where saphirs sparkles, where slippers are made of vair and speeches of wisdom. Marble gets such a peculiar sound under my feet, my shoes’ soft slide makes me feel like I am floating, floating… Life is so perfectly easy.

I wander on those marbled grounds and I feel like a queen. I feel possessed by a subtil power, as if I was mistress of the place by the simple noise of my almost Roman slippers’ noise within those rich and beautiful Michelangelo’s ornate walls. I am fully mastering my fate, my incertain future, by the huge power of the beauty I am facing.
This glory could intimidate me, make me smaller; yet, it ennobles me. It deeply moves me, its speaks the heart and soul language, it talks to the delicate essence of my being. It whispers to my weaknesses to make them bright, strong and changed.
This refinement doesn’t crush, it praises the ones who made Rome and the rest of the world’s testimonies, and it stands for our – us, simple visitors -, tiny pieces of history, that minute we are sharing with the place, as much as the Great Men’s. This splendor talks to the Roman in each of us, it makes our separate and individual wandering a Whole. It reveals to our humanity for we all share a Roman DNA, and gives us this beautiful feeling of belonging.
This wonder is not elitist, it is republican in the purest meaning of the word; it is a “public thing”. Therefore it is ours. Therefore it is mine.

I wander on those marbled grounds and I feel like a queen. Even only for a minute.

I might almost understand the Roman Empire’s end. Imperators, or even “simple” senators, enclosed in their golden palaces far from the madding crowd, marble silencing the pain in a beautiful bravade, were floating above their wonderful tiles, like I do now, oblivious of the world. The world being the collapse of what previous Cesareans had built for centuries. They were called Roman, when blinded by their rich ornements and their beautiful palaces, they didn’t see they only had a Roman figure, but not his true nature. They had forgotten to blend into the genius Nation and they fell.

As much as I am rising here and now.

Or was it yesterday? I got lost in Princess Ann’s feelings… Palaces have faded away but not the incredible evanescence they spread on me, but not the healing process they planted inside: I am queen in my kingdom, even if my throne is only my skin.

And, Emperess of my flesh, I praise empty days. Hours fly through this Augustian Rome without being able to remember nor understand lengths of time, shadowed in the Via Pigneto apartment’s false Sunday coolness.

Justine T.Annezo – August 23rd 2020, Roman Palazzi – GMT+2