short walk in Rome, 11 October 2018, long walk through history

This is an approximation of our walk as described pictured below. Covering worlds from Before Current Era [BCE] and traveling as far away as El Salvador. This is normal for a short walk.

We set out down Via Baccina, in Monti, a place called on the map Work, the Google map allowing me to nominate a 'home' and a 'work'. Nice work if you can get it...

It is late afternoon, sun has vanished, drizzle started, some spots of rain on lens below.

Some links out are to Italian language pages. For translation offer, use the Chrome browser, or take the URL and put it into left side of a page at https://translate.google.com/ set to translate from Italian to English. When you press enter, the URL will appear in the right column. When you then click on that URL you will get a translation.

Via Baccina

That is the Arco dei Pantani, the arch entrance from the Forum to the Subura.
Anna Zelli offers background.
At this point you may wish to get lost in Anna Zelli's site.. :-)
We are standing here above the Cloaca Magna, the great sewer of ancient Rome.
Whether the anatomical in birds use of cloaca to describe the orifice from which both egg and refuse flows
precedes the use of cloaca to refer to this most remarkable evidence of ancient Roman civilation,
the drain that removes everything, I leave to your PhD thesis,
a project doubtless requiring residence in this street and the keeping of a couple of chooks
to put on leashes and take out to say hello to the dogs.

nothing is straightforward, to get to the ancient, which is to the left, one must duck up through a bit of the bit more modern

Passing a bit of very recent art. This delightful artist first encountered at Arezzo...
or perhaps it's a school of artists.

and we emerge at Trajan's Forum, to zig back left towards Augustus's forum

a view from Augustus's forum over Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali, to Roman pines
and the Capitoline hill, the Campidoglio, the Capital
from whence springeth all the politico-geographical uses of the word capital.

Caesar himself, or a replica. In the construction, or carving, of a great road through ancient Rome, Mussolini linked
Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum. There is a long standing rule that one must scoff at Mussolini.
Mussolini established a milder than Hitler form of right wing dictatorship, giving the world the label fascist. 
made murky by his alliance with Hitler and being swallowed up by racist programs
and the normalisation of brutality which is alive in the world again now.
Along the Via dei Fori Imperiali are these symbols of Rome's greatness.

and here as elsewhere, Mussolini marked out the link with the past,
the acronym of republican ancient Rome
SPQR - Senatus Popolusque Romanorum
The Senate and People of Rome
the -que suffix in Latin meaning and, but perhaps greater affinity than et, meaning and

Italy has for a long time been a highly visitable smirkable-at place for people from the north, English and German in particular.

My writing this last night was interrupted when we went out to follow sounds to the festa in the Piazza della Madonna ai Monti, at the end of the block. And found that much of the beer bottle scattering around the fountain at night appeared to be from the circles of middle aged Germans, seated oblivous, like slugs on a lettuce.  This minor rage relating to the question of how in modern times too, the smirking organised wealth of others gives rise ti nationalist movements.

Resuming seats, ladies and gentlemen... see down at the end of the Via dei Fori Imperiali a bit of the Colosseum.

we must cross to the other side, to the Roman Forum, not hard as traffic is limited.

I seem to have been able to eliminate the crowds around me

I like that this brings together Warhol and Pollock in the Museum of the Risorgimento, the great movement for Italian unification in the 1800s, backing into the foundations of the Capitol.

and to arrive at this centre of centres, capitol of capitals,
Wikipedia offers some sense of the complex history.
The piazza designed by Michelangelo, the figure at the centre on horse is the Emperor Marcus Aurelius
whose statue was not melted down with other pre-christian art in the early middle ages
because it was thought to be Constantine, who converted the empire to Christianity.

I confessed to Helen that there was a time, 50 years ago, when with visitors on board the car
it was a late night entertainment to do gentle wheelies round M Aurelius.
So if I seem at times a stuff shirt, that's just the pasta
and the normal human process of editing one's past.

Three minds, three stories

the normal human need to work out what to do next
the tourist maps of Rome lay out the city with more beauty
 than accuracy as to what streets are and are not
... some add beauty. Thank you.

the gentle staircase of Michelangelo

You can click to enlarge this and other photos.
The scene is of a Roman high school teacher taking a photo at end of his class excursion.
The crowd are on Michelangelo's staircase.
In the centre is the more severe medieval staircase to Santa Maria in Aracoeli.
Wikipedia's account of the history of that church and site goes back 2500 years or so.
To the left is the thing regarded monstrous by many Romans, the Altar of the Nation,
the Victor Emanuel Monument or just the Wedding Cake, another chop into history to implant
a new historical marker, this one after the unification of Italy.
It seems cut of the same cloth, member of the same art genre as Liberace.
Many visitor love it as there's an elevator to near the top and a grand view.

from down here we dived into the streets of the ghetto.

... where in a laneway I encountered, facing each other,
two very different ways of saying the same thing.
One wonders what these doors could possibly say to each other,
as also one might wonder how the one should have such airs of northern severity
while the other has such, um, local charm...

LEAVE THIS PASSAGE CLEAR, EVEN AT NIGHT

I INTERRUPT this writing...
We are multitaskers!
Helen at 9am has said we must find a bancomat [ATM] at an actual bank
so I asked Google maps just now for directions to a bank nearby, from 'work'.
For some reason Ms Google remains attached both to long walks AND
to the beautiful city of Arezzo, offering this advice to us on finding a bank.

The starting out using the ancient Via Cassia looks fun,
but then skipping to Orvieto... to walk along the side of the Autostrada del Sole
just looks lethal.

Back to story... we come upon the Piazza di Campitelli and the church there

where there is notice of a commemoration of the life of Oscar Romero,
in the days when declared a saint.
If you follow that link you may never return.
In the hypertrophy of churchism in Rome and elsewhere
you find these links to other worlds and struggles

in the blood of martyrs
a church revived

In the name of the church there is 'in Portico' which refers to the nearby Portico di Ottavia,
where you can see the jumble of life over thousands of years.

There were many restaurants in this ghetto area preparing for an evening of gathering to mark the anniversary
of Mussolini's 1938 racist legislation, in a moment now when again there is some racism upwelling in politics and streets.

Eventually, crowds thickening, night falling, we arrived at the Pantheon
which when we last walked by in 2011 in the evening was a place of quiet beauty.
We fled.




Fifty years ago I often entered from the right around dawn, heading to work. The piazza empty.
The miraculous building quietly breathing like some ancient live thing.

It contains the tombs of kings of Italy before the current republic (monarchists with petitions often in attendance), it contains the tomb of Raphael, the young-dying sex addict.
it is of architecture not successfully copied in 2000 years.