A month in Rome
Often time when I go to a modern art gallery, I enjoy scribbling down the feelings that it evokes. It might have nothing to do with the reality of what the painter intends to express, but simply how the work expresses itself to me without its real context; what it makes me think in the first few moments of staring at it. Now, it has been exactly a month since I moved to Rome: a city that I have wanted to indulge myself in for as long as I can remember. So this is an attempt to record my first feelings, the very first thoughts of this experience as if 'a month in Rome' was a piece of art in itself.
The first and most powerful idea that hits you in this experience is that you realise that you are a continuation of human history. The past has left behind a grand abundance for this generation to enjoy; the current generation is gracefully imbibing it while treading forward in their modernity. You see, I come from India; a country that also has a long history, but we don't really live "with" our past as the Romans do. We preseve our past in museums and in temples and in palaces. They are places where we go and pay a visit to our days of yore and cherish them; it somewhat reminds me of the same essence as the concept of paying a visit to the grave of a fond relative has. It is well apprehended but yet well separated from the current reality.
Whereas in Rome, you walk down to Piazza Venezia and you will see the whole agility of a truly modern city perfectly in harmony with the early 90s exuberance of Altare della Patria that leads on to the heart of ancient Foro Romano. You see the normality of modern life amidst the ancient ruins and the grand baroque structures- women with tall Stilettos racing past the street musicians with shopping bags hanging all over them, groups of youngsters sitting on the corner or on the stairways to chitchat over some pile of what looks like school homework, a bunch of old men having their evening smoke under a 'lollipop' tree (they call it 'pino' here), a herd of countless people hurridly moving towards the metro station and all that jazz of the big city life perfectly performing on a stage set by layers of history. The baroque grandness is not a past, here you still live in the grandiosity that the history has bequeathed. If you try to cross the crazy traffic on Piazza della Repubblica or Piazza Barberini, you can die getting distracted by the exquisitely carved grand sculptures that reroutes the traffic and act as a roundabout for the roads. It's a peculiar feeling; of having all that you wanted to live in but a bit too much to take in at once. It feels so out of place that sometimes it makes me emphasise deeply with the protagonist of the story 'Pygmalion'. I even sense it in the language here; there is a constant presence of the past even in their language. You can feel that it belongs to an era where people had all the time in the world to cherish and relish everything like 'luce di sole' or 'Piazza della Republica', where English would have lost her patience and cut it all down to 'sunlight' and 'Republican square'.
There is another alien feeling that has frequented me in the last one month. This is the feeling you get when you enter one of the baroque churches that stands imposingly in almost every other street of this city. While a major part of you is occupied in revering and apotheosizing the masterpieces of Baroque art, a small part of you remembers Karl Marx and the Protestant movements. In the tall halls gritted with gold and bronze, embellished with marble inlays and adorned with painted stain glass windows, these churches house intricately carved sculptures. In these statues, you can see each muscle fibre that is flexed, strands of hair flying of across their polished foreheads, veins on their foot delicately adding complexity to the smoothness of marble, folds of the silk garment fluttering in an unfelt wind and sometimes, even the cracks of the toenails. These artists almost created perfect humans and just fell short of breathing life into them, probably out of their respect for the divine. While a part of you admires the abstract concept of what a human passion can lead to and the other is too occupied in struggling to imbibe all the beauty your eye isn't trained to hold. It is an exasperating feeling, the one that leaves you feeling humble even as you stand in the probably the least humble of ambience you could ever imagine. If you have even doubted the phrase "too much beauty, you have to visit Rome to understand it.
Often time when I go to a modern art gallery, I enjoy scribbling down the feelings that it evokes. It might have nothing to do with the reality of what the painter intends to express, but simply how the work expresses itself to me without its real context; what it makes me think in the first few moments of staring at it. Now, it has been exactly a month since I moved to Rome: a city that I have wanted to indulge myself in for as long as I can remember. So this is an attempt to record my first feelings, the very first thoughts of this experience as if 'a month in Rome' was a piece of art in itself.
The first and most powerful idea that hits you in this experience is that you realise that you are a continuation of human history. The past has left behind a grand abundance for this generation to enjoy; the current generation is gracefully imbibing it while treading forward in their modernity. You see, I come from India; a country that also has a long history, but we don't really live "with" our past as the Romans do. We preseve our past in museums and in temples and in palaces. They are places where we go and pay a visit to our days of yore and cherish them; it somewhat reminds me of the same essence as the concept of paying a visit to the grave of a fond relative has. It is well apprehended but yet well separated from the current reality.
Whereas in Rome, you walk down to Piazza Venezia and you will see the whole agility of a truly modern city perfectly in harmony with the early 90s exuberance of Altare della Patria that leads on to the heart of ancient Foro Romano. You see the normality of modern life amidst the ancient ruins and the grand baroque structures- women with tall Stilettos racing past the street musicians with shopping bags hanging all over them, groups of youngsters sitting on the corner or on the stairways to chitchat over some pile of what looks like school homework, a bunch of old men having their evening smoke under a 'lollipop' tree (they call it 'pino' here), a herd of countless people hurridly moving towards the metro station and all that jazz of the big city life perfectly performing on a stage set by layers of history. The baroque grandness is not a past, here you still live in the grandiosity that the history has bequeathed. If you try to cross the crazy traffic on Piazza della Repubblica or Piazza Barberini, you can die getting distracted by the exquisitely carved grand sculptures that reroutes the traffic and act as a roundabout for the roads. It's a peculiar feeling; of having all that you wanted to live in but a bit too much to take in at once. It feels so out of place that sometimes it makes me emphasise deeply with the protagonist of the story 'Pygmalion'. I even sense it in the language here; there is a constant presence of the past even in their language. You can feel that it belongs to an era where people had all the time in the world to cherish and relish everything like 'luce di sole' or 'Piazza della Republica', where English would have lost her patience and cut it all down to 'sunlight' and 'Republican square'.
There is another alien feeling that has frequented me in the last one month. This is the feeling you get when you enter one of the baroque churches that stands imposingly in almost every other street of this city. While a major part of you is occupied in revering and apotheosizing the masterpieces of Baroque art, a small part of you remembers Karl Marx and the Protestant movements. In the tall halls gritted with gold and bronze, embellished with marble inlays and adorned with painted stain glass windows, these churches house intricately carved sculptures. In these statues, you can see each muscle fibre that is flexed, strands of hair flying of across their polished foreheads, veins on their foot delicately adding complexity to the smoothness of marble, folds of the silk garment fluttering in an unfelt wind and sometimes, even the cracks of the toenails. These artists almost created perfect humans and just fell short of breathing life into them, probably out of their respect for the divine. While a part of you admires the abstract concept of what a human passion can lead to and the other is too occupied in struggling to imbibe all the beauty your eye isn't trained to hold. It is an exasperating feeling, the one that leaves you feeling humble even as you stand in the probably the least humble of ambience you could ever imagine. If you have even doubted the phrase "too much beauty, you have to visit Rome to understand it.
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