1. Still, The Bombers
Milan’s museum of the twentieth century is (to my dilettante knowledge) the newest institution on the Piazza del Duomo. The reception is comfortably modern, dark wood and fluorescents burning into the perpetual ornate beigeness of southern-European-old-city to make way for International-style white cube. History demands sequentiality which the space of an old city finds difficult to provide. Opposite the museum, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is more than a century old. Between them sits the Duomo, which dates to the year 355.
Artworks in the Museo are arranged vertically from the second floor up. The museum’s proud of its collection of Futurism, bold slashes of red, orange, and blue tracing out cyclists, arcades, limbs. Marinetti was driven by iconoclasm: the motorcar making roadkill of the past. In his time there were more and more factories in the city churning out bicycles, aeroplanes, motorcars. A power plant once sat within the shadow of the Duomo. Boccioni’s striding patriarch adorns the centre of the room, cast in fiery bronze.
On the third floor we find the Cambrian explosion of the rest of the early twentieth century, with de Chirico and Carra and Sironi and the like. Fourth floor opens up with a floor-to-ceiling window and a mezzanine housing some works from the 1950s and on. The 1930s and 1940s, it seems, have been artfully avoided; but outside the window is the plaza and beyond that the city, all smooth facades and wide streets and the occasional glass rectangle sticking out in the distance and I realise we’ve been looking at the war or its aftermath, the skyline as canvas, after waves of Allied bombers hard-reset so much of the historic core to dust.
Space demands contemporaneity out of history, despite the city. The futurists grafted themselves onto rhetorics of destruction and speed; cf. the parallel development of a city’s industrial capacity, the great factories of bicycles and engines and things; cf. a city, at last, laid to waste for its factories of fighter-planes and armoured cars. Iconoclasm, it seems, finally comes home to roost.
The mezzanine floor is dominated by Lucio Fontana, who, after the war, returned to his home city to create red-brown canvases slashed through with knives. At the centre of each colour-field runs a deep, black scar.
2. Wet Feet, Heavy Hearts
Always a little smaller than one remembers, stepping out from under the train or bus station, the water lapping at one’s feet, rain slick on the shattered tiles of Santiago Calatrava’s sloping glass folly. How can it be but otherwise, with the world bearing down on it? All its tongues are present here: Italian, Spanish, English from all her colonies; one out of every three voices is south-accented Mandarin barked into a tinny portable mic. Luggage wheels on cracked limestone—the poor souls.
With no map or guide we find ourselves moving towards the Rialto. Part of this is good wayfinding, with signs every hundred or so metres pointing towards the main attractions (in like five or six different fonts). Part of this is Google, beaming down in its benevolence the quickest paths between A and B to the tens of thousands of phones here, tens of thousands of feet treading the centuries-old pavement, following the old streets, the old cracks, the routes cut into the city’s texture through identical souvenir shops that line the designated streets. Later in the trip a common occurrence is finding yourself pathed through an alley no wider than a pair of shoulders, after the ‘ah-ha!’ moment of discovering the hidden path on your phone, only to see yourself mirrored in the gestures of the backpacking couple before you, who from the looks on all their screenlit faces have chanced upon the same secret as you. We snake through the streets, queue-like; we all know exactly where we are headed.
The city built for the low hundred-thousands starts to become ridiculous and toy-like. Not uncommon to find twenty or thirty people trying to squeeze past each other over a six-foot-wide bridge, or sixty people queueing for a bookstore the size of two family sedans. The great questions that come to mind are no longer Romantic but logistical: can we fit a hundred thousand in Piazza San Marco; what will they eat; where will they shit? Solve it with signs and one-euro public toilets; solve it with a tourist tax. Weeks later, reading of anti-tax locals who fear their city is becoming a museum, their struggles seem almost faraway and provincial. Who is Venice to deny the world? The world surely has not denied it. Boats and cobblestones strain under the world’s weight.
Thirty-six hours later, spilling back out onto the Grand Canal, shops low as houses, seawater on the tiles. In Genting or Vegas you’d find that same flat painted sky, the plaster-coated walls so thin you’d think a costumed cast member could emerge at any minute. Horrified, we flee back to our hotel in Mestre, wringing out our wet umbrellas and coats.
3. Everpresent, Florentine
History in the Piazza della Signora comes to life in piles of contorted bodies. Lithe Perseus, foot on Medusa’s naked corpse, her head still dripping blood. Behind him the Sabines scream. Something horrific about stone in the way it holds impassionately still, makes certain recurrence of what should have passed. Again with the ten thousand citizens of the world milling about the weathered plinths snapping photos. The view from the corner of the platform is identical to the oil painting made of the square two hundred years ago. The same women, the same frozen scenes. (The Nazis, passing through, left much of this centre untouched.)
In Anna Banti’s Artemesia, a historical biography of the titular Renaissance painter, war’s aftermath is overlaid on the past in waves of remembering and grief. Refugees crowd the Ponte Vecchio, survivors seek shelter from machine-gun fire in the hills of the Palazzo Pitti, young children search for loved ones in the rubble of the waterfront and collect precious water from the city’s last working fountains. Banti is trying to elucidate a history of art and its suffering but the shadow of a wounded Florence is never far behind. One gets the sense when moving through the city of a parallel haunting, the shadow of a wounded art never quite leaving the present, by way of the permanence of rubble, of stone. Elsewhere, children and women are starving in Juba, Rafah, Rakhine. Young couples share bread on the Palazzo hill. Portraits of decapitations, their faces flushed in ochre. The crowd of tourists stumbling from the plaza of statues only stops for the double rainbow appearing over the River Arno, as if a signal in a dream.
The gallery is the sum total of these visions. One far-flung hope of art is that in reproducing the pain of others, we might come closer to addressing it in our present. Nevertheless, the pain of others, in its oils, marble, and prose, remains. What is to be done save to tear it down and make a kindness out of this mess?
4. Hands Tight Around Rocks
The essay would have started like this: Mussolini saw the great tangle of the city and thought, well, let's raze a road through it, let it run past the stadium, let the world see what order had intended for this land. Allied Shermans took the same road back up, in pursuit of the fleeing rearguard. From leather sandals to jackboots I would write a little history of the many people who had passed through you in search of you.
But it was difficult to tread where many once had. So much writing about the city and it all fades like the repeated grafitti over the walls of the Colosseum: Dante was here, as was Diego, as was the Class of Three-Letter University 1926. Little pegs in the rocks where the peasants had once pitched makeshift housing, all wooden beams and waxed cloth, excrement running down the gutters and staining the limestone black. All those martyrs, all that seawater, all that blood.
At the top of the Palatine hill you can see the tops of the buildings of the Forum peek out from behind the branches of trees, which would not have been there in the time of military occupation, so as not to obstruct the sighting of cannon-fire, so that if you were one of the Republicans on the hill looking north towards the formidable Loyalists you would only need to turn your head to take in the view of all you had sworn to protect, the eternal city, bastions and all, filth and stone. You bleed out, are overrun, are replaced.
So it goes, so it goes.
I read Calvino's The Narrative of Trajan's Column on the flight back from Ciampino and I was struck by the frankness in which he crafts endings. The ancient ruins, graffiti, artifacts, and marbles are unceremoniously hinged shut with an observation, a physical property, a coincidence of history. If such a sentence were a door it would be a simple wooden one, old but well-oiled, hanging uneasily upon the latch.
For Rome, my thoughts drift to the pigeons among the cars in the parking lot below the Tarpeian Rock, pecking at pizza crumbs between the puddles of beer on the cobblestones. They are content to remain there for a while. Thus we leave the continent behind and head into the present.