Rome

of his seat or humming the notes of “Vesti la giubba” along with (or just a wee fraction ahead of) the singer, to prove his familiarity with the piece. (When this happens, it is an invitation to murder.)

Painting and sculpture are silent arts, and deserve silence (not phony reverence, just quiet) from those who look at them. Let it be inscribed on the portals of the world’s museums: what you will see in here is not meant to be a social experience. Shut up and use your eyes. Groups with guides, docents, etc., admitted Wednesdays only, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Otherwise, just shut the fuck up, please, pretty please, if you can, if you don’t mind, if you won’t burst. We have come a long way to look at these objects, too. We have not done so to listen to your golden words. Capisce?

The only way to circumvent this Sistine crowding is to pay what is in effect a hefty ransom to the Vatican. After closing hours, it now runs small tour groups through the Vatican Museums, guaranteeing the visitor about two hours (start to finish) with Michelangelo and Raphael and, of course, a guide, whose silence is not guaranteed; “normal” viewing time in the chapel itself is about thirty minutes, which is a good deal more than the usual visitor, harried and chivvied, is going to get. The tour groups, at present about one a week, are made up of about ten people, though there may be as many as twenty. (The very first time I went to the Sistine, there were, by my rough count, about thirty people in the whole chapel, but that, I repeat, was some fifty years ago. It felt a little crowded then, but not intolerable, as it is today.) Each visitor, under the new tour system, pays up to five hundred dollars—some three hundred euros per person—for the privilege, and the deal is done through outside contractors, not directly with the Vatican itself. How the fee is split is not known. Of course, this is highway robbery. If you don’t like it, you can always write to the pope; or else buy some postcards and study those in the calm and quiet of your hotel.

What happens inside churches also happens outside, on a vaster scale. No European city that I know has been as damaged, its civic experience as brutally compromised, by automobile and driver as Rome.

The traffic of Rome used to be bad, but now it is indiscriminately lethal. Parking in Rome used to be a challenge that required special skills, but now it is almost comically impossible. Of course, it is rendered all the more difficult—in contrast, let’s say, to parking in Barcelona—by the near-impossibility of discovering an underground public garage: such amenities do exist, but they are rare, since the city government cannot dig below ground level without invariably encountering some ancient, illegible, and archaeologically superfluous buried ruin from the time of Pompey or Tarquin the Arrogant, an unwelcome discovery which will freeze all future work on the site for all ages to come—in omnia saecula saeculorum, as the Church used to say, before it abandoned the Latin for the vernacular Mass.

The most astonishing thing about the city used to be, until recently, the Romans’ cavalier disregard for the chief thing that brought so many people there—namely, its deposit of art. People are apt to suppose that a nation which has been left enormous cultural legacies by its ancestors can automatically be assumed to be highly cultivated in the here and now. Italy is one big proof that this is not true.

Most Italians are artistic illiterates. Most people anywhere are; why should Italians be any different? Though once they pretended not to be, today most of them can’t even bother to pretend. Many of them see the past as a profitable encumbrance. They like to invoke the splendors of their patrimonio culturale, but when it comes to doing anything about them, like turning their considerable energies toward preserving that inheritance in an intelligible way, or even to forming a solid and organized constituency of museumgoers, little or nothing is done, and nothing or little happens.

What the Italian public really cares about is calcio, soccer. If an Italian government were crazy enough to try to ban soccer matches, those astounding orgies of hysteria in which hundreds of thousands of fans explode into orgasms of loyalty for this team or that team, the nation would cease to be a nation; it would become ungovernable. Not only does high culture not function as a social glue in this country, it probably has less local pride invested in it than anywhere else in Western Europe. What really count are sport and TV, and their pre-eminence is assured by the fact the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is a multi-multi-millionaire from ownership of both, and seems to have no cultural interests, let alone commitments of any kind, apart from top-editing the harem of blondies for his quiz shows. That is why most Italians can contemplate, with relative equanimity, the very real prospect that their Ministry of Culture’s already beleaguered and inadequate budget will be slashed, as is now being suggested, by as much as 30 percent by the year 2012, while its present director is replaced by the present chief of McDonald’s. If that happened, how many votes would it cost Berlusconi? A few thousand, a smattering of disaffected aesthetes who never liked him to begin with and can be quite safely disregarded. And tourists, of course. But they cannot vote.

You might say that it has always been this way, but actually it has not. It has gotten worse since the sixties with the colossal, steamrolling, mind-obliterating power of TV—whose Italian forms are among the worst in the world. The cultural IQ of the Italian nation, if one can speak of such a thing, has dropped considerably, and the culprit seems to be television, as it is in other countries. What is the point of fostering elites that few care about? It bestows no political advantage. In a wholly upfront culture of football, “reality” shows, and celebrity games, a culture of pure distraction, it is no longer embarrassing to admit that Donatello, like the temperature of the polar ice cap or the insect population of the Amazon, is one of those things about which you, as a good molto tipico Italian and nice enough guy, do not personally give a rat’s ass.

Perhaps (one hopefully adds) it only takes two or three artists to reanimate a culture. One cannot simply write a culture off because it has gone into recession, because recessions—as history amply proves—can turn out to be merely temporary. Nevertheless, at this moment, it doesn’t look terribly likely. Do I feel this only because I am older, somewhat callused, less sensitive to indications of renewal? Perhaps. But do I feel it because the cultural conditions of the city itself have changed so radically—because, in a word, the Rome of Berlusconi is no longer (and cannot possibly become again) the Rome of Fellini? That, too, is possible, and indeed more likely. In the meantime, there are at least compensations. The energies of what was once the present may no longer be there. They may have been something of an illusion, as promises and first impacts are fated to be. But the glories of the remoter past remain, somewhat diminished but obstinately indelible, under the dreck and distractions of overloaded tourism and coarsened spectacle. Like it or lump it, Rome is there; one cannot ignore it.

There is always a level of delight on which Rome can be enjoyed—unashamedly, sensuously, openly. Is there a solution to the present difficulties and enigmas of Rome? If there is, I freely confess that I have no idea what it might be. So many centuries of history are wound inextricably into the city and confront the visitor, let alone the resident, with apparently insoluble problems of access and understanding. It wasn’t built in a day and can’t be understood in one, or a week, or a month or year—in however much time you may allot to it, a decade or a guided bus ride. It makes you feel small, and it is meant to. It also makes you feel big, because the nobler parts of it were raised by members of your own species. It shows you what you cannot imagine doing, which is one of the beginnings of wisdom. You have no choice but to go there in all humility, dodging the Vespas, admitting that only a few fragments of the city will disclose themselves to you at a time, and some never will. It is an irksome, frustrating, contradictory place, both spectacular and secretive. (What did you expect? Something easy and self- explanatory, like Disney World?) The Rome we have today is an enormous concretion of human glory and human error. It shows you that things were done once whose doings would be unimaginable today. Will there ever be another Piazza Navona? Don’t hold your breath. There is and can be only one Piazza Navona, and, fortunately, it is right in front of you, transected by the streams of glittering water—a gift to you and to the rest of the world from people who are dead and yet can never die. One such place, together with all the rest that are here, is surely enough.

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