It seems both paradoxical and appropriate that just as my time in Ghent did not really take off until I had returned from my October trip to Hungary, it ends, not in Belgium but in Italy – in Rome. It is also hard exactly to say what led me and Lukas here, except that four days ago, after a successful day’s cycling along the Schelde valley on the outskirts of Ghent, we decided that we should celebrate my departure from Ghent with a short trip together. Where should we go? Again, the world seemed to lie at our feet. It could have been Istanbul or Athens, or a smaller city, say Seville or Valencia, but something prompted me to say Rome, and we immediately agreed that it was a brilliant idea. Rome, ‘Rome open city’, Pasolini’s Rome, Rossellini’s Rome, the Rome of La Grande Bellezza. It seemed somehow appropriate that I would share my final moments with Lukas in a scene of dramatic, baroque magnificence, the seat of western civilization. It is a city where the classical and modern worlds lie close as lovers. Stone kissing marble. The first day was spent companionably walking around the formerly ‘working class’ neighbourhood of Trastevere, on the sound east side of the fiume Tevere or Tiber as it was known in classical times. It was a short walk from the apartment that we had rented (at a very reasonable price) on the Via Arenula in the ‘Ghetto’ district of Rome, once the home of a newly monied class of Syrian and Jewish settlers from the south of the city. Even with the overcast weather, the generous nineteen degree temperatures made the city feel convivial and pleasant. I had been to Rome before, on a family holiday ten years ago, so it was not wholly unfamiliar to me. Though memories of particularities had long since faded from my mind, a more general recollection of the atmosphere of the city came back clearly into focus. I can say it no other way: I love Rome. I love the climate and the culture of the city; the easy, charming fluidity of the life on the streets. I love the heavy incense of pine trees and the smell of burning wood from hidden courtyards filling pockets of the city with a deep and sensual aroma, warm as honey or wine. Then there are the sights of the old city and relics of a bygone era of small-scale urban industry and manufacturing – frame makers, mechanics, cheesemongers – working in small workshops or shops down hidden mews. It is the unique good fortune of the Romans that they have preserved so wittingly or unwittingly those artefacts of the past that once made Rome the most important, wealthy and beautiful city of the world. The tabacconists still have the same pine panelling they had in the sixties, the same bar. The buildings have been preserved or maintained in a state of partial degradation, which seems organic and just a sign that all buildings and monuments are subject to the same processes of change as those of ruins. Both the maintenance task of keeping the old buildings, shops and bits of infrastructure alive and yet their inevitable relapse into decline seems to express both a respect and passion for those things that were made well and beautifully in former times. There is an honesty in this preservationism of ordinary hands. It seems to say we are a society in a constant process of rebirth and reconception, ever growing, ever, changing and ever dying. There is an honesty in the church frescoes that are not retouched and in the clay walls that are cracked and discoloured by the sun. I am flawed and dirty and half ruined, Rome seems to say, yet I am still beautiful and in the past was the wonder of the whole earth. It is the only city indeed, which I could honestly describe as a living museum, with all the greatest treasures in its collection displayed in the outdoors. The city itself is a great work of art, a montage of the creative efforts of some of the greatest artists known to human history. There is little red tape: tourists can wind and wander freely among the ruins, the crumbling collonnades, amphitheatres, the doric columns. Doors and gates have been broken down, or were never made to begin with. The whole city feels like an open book for those who wish to read it, a place whose beauties pour bounty upon those with eyes to see and hands to touch. After walking around Trastevere and visiting a number of splendid basilicas and churches with extremely fine Byzantine wall mosaics glimmering in stoney apses, we crossed back over the Ponte Cestio as it began to get dark. Suddenly I saw a staircase leading down towards the tumultuous banks of the water. Due to recent rainfall, the river was moving very swiftly. We descended a staircase which led down from the Isola Tiberina and then began tiptoeing our way along an elevated concrete lip at the edge of the water, stalling and hesitating like tight-rope-walkers. The river was so flooded and overwhelmed with water that trees, presumably normally safe on land were marooned in the centre of the Tiber’s grey churning currents which did not abate for a second. Somehow we made our way towards the furthest tip of this island isthmus, a place that on a more placid day would probably be thronging with tourists. But in the dying light of a Tuesday evening, off-season, Lukas myself and one solitary man in his fifties, doing nothing in particular, were the only ones to enjoy the serene and save beauty of the island retreat. The caps of two ice-cold peroni beers hissed open. We sat drinking our beers, smoking cigarettes and looking out at the flooded margin of the water. We also kissed and kissed and kissed. At no particular point on the way back home, weaving between blind, dim roads we stumbled upon a secondhand bookshop. I opened a collection of essays by A.S Byatt. Inscribed upon its opening page was an epigraph by Boris Pasternak. It read:
A man’s humanity can be measured against the degree to which he has loved other people and the degree to which other people have loved him.
833 words a day 