From A Window On Monte Mario - I

Near the portable altar in my room there hangs an old Roman print. It is a scene of the Piazza della Rotonda four or five centuries ago. The Crescenzi Palace is shown, and the Pantheon dedicated to all the gods. (When a Barbarini Pope took much of its bronze for Berrini’s great canopy in St. Peter’s, the local wits said: “What the Barbarians did not take, the Barbarini did!”) The center of the scene, however, is a fish market, and most of the Romans strolling around the muddy square are eating fish.

Eight feet away is a balcony where I am writing now. We are on the highest hill of Rome. You can look miles over the gleaming buildings as you try to follow the course of the Tiber. It meanders past the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the Vatican, the old section of Trastever, then beyond St. Paul’s Outside-the-Walls on the Ostia, Rome’s seaport.

When it is clear (and the city has been incredibly bright this Fall) the legendary hills can be traced. You can spot the dim outlets of the gay towns of Frascati and Tivoli. And you can try to guess where the Appian Way leads after it passes the catacombs.

St. Rata on Strata

In Rome old maps, prints and engravings come alive. It’s as if you looked out from Atlanta’s Merchandise Mart and was most of its history: tracing the old Indian trails and the railroads that sprang up in the 1850’s. Then the siege and burning of the city with Scarlett and Rhett rushing out of it in a commandeered wagon. Then the geographical residue of the long, painful rebuilding. And now the expressways, airport and the Stadium. But Atlanta, like most American cities, is not only very young. It has the American habit of hiding, forgetting, tearing down and finally burying its past.

Rome is too old to do that. Besides, the Italians see nothing incongruous in the passage of time. Old Castel Sant’ Angelo near St. Peter’s was once a mausoleum for Emperor Hadrian, then a chapel to commemorate the Virgin Mary’s protection against a plaque, and later a prison that held such diverse persons as Pope Clement VII, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Count of Cagliostro who sold “powders to beautify ugly women.”

The Castel also has won fame as the backdrop of the opera Tosca. Today it does the same favor for movie casting agencies and their motley volunteers. It’s all in a day’s work, or you might say the mix-up of a millennium.

“La Dolce Vita”

Rome today is 2 1/2 million people, most of them engaged in piloting small cars on motor Vespas into and around thousands of white-hatted police. Traffic fills the streets from dawn till the following 2 a.m. with time off after lunch for a three-hour siesta.

The purpose of the siesta is not rest. It simply re-charges the body-cells so that every Roman citizen can get back into that traffic. Most of them I guess, are going to work or to market or to someone else’s home. The last is a ridiculous assumption, of course, because all your friends are driving too.

There is a healthy, prosperous tempo in Rome today, more heavily accented than when I saw Rome in the post-war days. Roads always led to Rome (like the Aurelian and the Flaminian); now they lead out of them too with workers and business men headed for the vast complex called EUR; film stars for the 14 studios at Cinecitta; and statesmen, salesmen, students, diplomats, tourists, and now a pope, on their way to the international airport at Fiumicino. Communism, very defiant in 1950, seems to be contained, frustrated and confused today.

One of the saddest streets in the world, in my opinion, is the Via Veneto, renowned as the habitat of the old breed jet set and the new breed space set. It reminds me of one of the avenues of sculpture in Villa Borgese where Roman warriors and statesmen of the past stare grimly at each other across the shaded road. Via Veneto is also shaded by lovely trees, and every night it seems to duplicate the stony faces of the Villa.

Over the side-walk cafe-tables, grim faces are enshrined in the light of the hotel windows, in a mosaic of metal tables, half empty glasses and little mounds of cigarette butts. They peer at the passers-by, and they peer back. Some are middle-class folk out for a stroll and a glass of wine. Many are foreign tourists yearning for a taste of la dolce vita to take back to South Dakota or Moscow.

In the Italians (Luigi Barzini’s book which everyone seems to be reading), he takes a look at the characters on the famous street; “lean, ambitious young men rising like gas bubbles of putrefaction in a muddy marsh...defeated and shabby old men (the insolent ones under Mussolini) now trying to hide their decay and loneliness...the flocks of unknown starlets hoping to be noticed...old actresses, photographers, black-market peddlers of hope or contraband cigarettes.”

Via Veneto is not Rome anymore than tawdry Times Square is New York. But it is a handy symbol of the decay that has sickened much of society today. Sad, empty, void? Certainly. Uninspired, helpless, hopeless? Probably. Worthy of help, mercy, compassion? Definitely. But gay, festive, venturesome -- la dolce vita? This would be difficult to maintain. The sculptured heads in the Borgese Villa stare grimly at you. The coiffured heads on the Via Veneto just stare.

Another Layer?

Even with field glasses, I can’t see this sad street from my window. Besides, I like the warm smiles, the gestures of kindness, the excited speech of Rome much better than an avenue of frustration. I’ll try to pry off that top 1964 layer, and take a look at another Rome, the one that burst in a bubble in April, 1945.

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop of Atlanta