An Endless Playground

This article and the accompanying images sourced from my Instagram feed were published in Abitare in 2015

Rome is a city in which the most beautiful squares imaginable, flanked by the most important, grandiose and sensuous buildings, containing Egyptian obelisks and Roman temples and Baroque fountains are used so efficiently as open-air car-parks, they are so tightly packed with Cinquecentos and Smarts and 4*4 Pandas and Multiplas, that pedestrians can often not cross from one side to the other, as they are unable to squeeze through between the bumpers of the vehicles. Everything coexists in Rome, the dirty, busy, gloriously dysfunctional life of a major metropolis pumps like blood through the accumulated wonders of three millennia, three empires and the 21st Century, and it is entirely blind to the provenance of things, medieval tower or nineteenth century factory, roman temple or neoclassical seminary, aqueduct or wall, if it can be used it will be, if it can’t it will be girdled and set aside, put in a park for teenagers to make-out on.

All cities are to one degree or another filled with the traces of their own history, and must deal with the question of how best to relate to those remains and what they mean to them, with these traces often exerting a tyrannical hold over the collective consciousness. In fact the younger the city is and the less it has been bequested by history, the more its history becomes important to its inhabitants. Seeking legitimacy in their heritage, cities look to anchor themselves in a past that is their own and justifies their current standing. Rome is the precise opposite. There is just too much. There is such an overwhelming, incomparable quantity of history, heritage, buildings, art, whole pieces of city, and infrastructure present all over the city, and from every period of European culture, from Nero to Mussolini, from Innocent X to il Boom, that in Rome heritage has reached critical mass, has become so massively dense and impossibly varied that it cannot be maintained in historical order and collapses in on itself. It implodes in a city-sized singularity in which all historical periods are coeval, in which they lose individual significance, in which time collapses and becomes purely spatial and we can walk in the present between every period whilst smoking a cigarette and chatting on our mobile phone. Rome is the internet as a city, it is the one place in which all architectural knowledge coexists simultaneously in one space, instantly accessible at the same time, and just as people mostly use the internet –the most awe-inspiring collection of information in human history- to watch videos of dancing Chihuahuas and Taylor Swift running from paparazzi, so Rome –the most extraordinary assembly of built material known to man- is mostly a place to buy Pope Francis mugs and complain about traffic on the way to work.

And therein lies the crux of what makes it so truly remarkable: its total and utter mundanity, its complete obliviousness in the face of its own importance. It wears its profundity as lightly as a summer t-shirt, mixing the high and the low, the old and the new, the dysfunctional and the grandiose, the sacred and the profane, the narrow-minded and the worldly, the politically volatile and the permanence of tradition in the most relaxed fashion imaginable. Its streets are magic corridors that transform the past as you walk down them into an agent of liberation, that shows you there is no one style, no one way of doing things, instead you can have it all, at the same time, together in flagrante delicto. For those fascinated by the forms of history, but shackled by the narrow and joylessness of historicism, for those in love with the intermingling of the quotidian and the profound, for those who can enjoy the simultaneous echoes of Bernini and Las Vegas in the zigzagging of a 1950s balcony or the intermingling of Borromini, Zaha and an American Diner in the over-exuberance of a 1990s Bar, for those of such sensibility, Rome is a playground of endless, diverse and exotic pleasures.

Alexander's Cup

^Still from Cadbury Flake Advert, 1992

Extract from p88 of the 2013 Penguin translation by Lara Gochin Raffaelli of Gabriele D'annunzio's 'Il Piacere'

This basin was historic: it was called Alexander’s Cup. It had been donated to the Princess of Bisenti by Cesare Borgia before he left for France to deliver the bill of divorce and the dispensation for marriage to Louis XII; and it must have been included among the fabled baggage carried by sumpter-mules that Valentinois brought with him when he entered Chinon, as described by the Seigneur de Brantome. The design of the figures that encompassed it and of those that arose from the rim of the two ends was attributed to Sanzio.

The cup was called Alexander’s because it had been created in memory of that prodigious one from which, at his great feasts, the Macedonian would prodigiously drink. Throngs of Sagittariuses encircled the sides of the vase with bows drawn, rioting, in wonderful poses like those Raphael painted, naked and shooting arrows toward the herm in the fresco found in the Borghese Gallery, decorated by Giovan Francesco Bolognesi. They were pursuing a great chimera, which rose up from the edge, like a handle, at one side of the vase, while on the opposite side bounded up the young Sagittarius Bellerophon with his bow drawn against the monster born of Typhon. The decorations of the base and the rim were of a pleasing elegance. The inside was gilded like that of a ciborium. The metal was as sonorous as a musical instrument. Its weight was five hundred pounds. Its entire form was harmonious.

Often, on a whim, Elena Muti would take her morning bath in that basin. She could immerse herself in it quite well if she did not stretch out; and nothing, in truth, was equal to the supreme grace of that body resting in the water which the gilt tinged with indescribably delicate reflections, because the metal was not yet silver, and the gold was fading.

Genius

^Tower, Sant’ Andrea delle Fratte, Borromini (source)

There are explosive minds of the kind of unstoppable genius that can bring forth whole worlds, that can render the content of their thoughts as communicable, experiential matter. The problem I have with this category of production is that it can only communicate through experience. The observer is offered no manner in which to discern the structure and order of the intellect and ideas that are displayed before him: his only enjoyment is that of an impression, an emotion.

At the other end of the spectrum there are those whose control of the processes of their minds is so complete that their work takes on the form of a spatial summa through which one can wander whilst having principles and orders crisply revealed to you. This type of space can also be phenomenally rewarding in the secondary, consciously intellectual sense, though it is invariably lacking in the rich ambiguity and delight present in the work of geniuses of the first order.

Occasionally one comes across something –a space, a canvas, a façade, a poem- in which there is either the two tendencies reconciled, or else the two in visible conflict. In reconciliation one is offered the chance of seeing both the growth of wild proliferation, the animal fertility of the human mind, and also spelled forth its innate illogic, logic, law or precise form of lawlessness.

In conflict the two can provide a vital and exemplary spectacle of the creative construction, erosion, explosion and containment that occurs over time in the push and pull between the beautiful impetuosity of a wild and fecund wilfulness, and its internal death drive for clarity, communication, abstraction and a wider relevance beyond the baseness of instinct, the latter annihilating the former, and the former the latter, in an endless trauma of the internalised dialectic. From this process fall the most pure artefacts of genius, spaces of tense equilibrium in which the impossible union of the subjective drive and the objective imperative is achieved in the forced and final reconciliation of real space.