the impact of Rome and the language of colour, the strength of film

It disturbs me that many people who flow through Rome run between famous things and do not see the city, do not allow the colour of the city to impact upon them. They seem to want to filter through the colours of home. What's the point of that then?


....Rome is full of colour. As is much of Italy, except where things are made of stone or carved of stone or made from baked clay.


The colours of Tuscany and Umbria also reflect the historically available palette of earthy colours. Look in a child's paint box and see Burnt Sienna and Light Umber. The paints are traditionally applied without the fixatives that would make them permanent, that prevent fading and streaking. That inhibit beauty evolving, that prevent ageing such as is normal in organic life.

You see on those walls, photo at left or left above on your browser, the street where we are in Rome, with diverse messages, some angry, some about football teams, some with bad words... and the very cute figures in the right foreground of the photo, by a graffitist whose works bring us to a halt here and there as we wander.

That scene comes into our minds now with sounds: the sound of the metal worker in the first door down there on the right, the sounds of coming and going from the market in the door behind the camera, and the crash-bang-screech-squeeze of the garbage truck at 3 in the afternoon or 6.30 in the evening. The sounds of the wheels of travellers' suitcases on the cobblestones before dawn, hastening for far away places at the end of time here... reminding us sometimes of frogs in the ponds at home when it rains, planes leaving...reminding us other times of the sounds of, of...of suitcases of travellers.

It is not all travellers here. There was, just along the street, a combined unions festival two weeks ago, three nights, about the role of women, focused on three of the women from here: Anna Magnani, Monica Vitti and Gabriella Ferri. The sounds of which floated to us, here my camera out the window. See again the colour, colour in the night, inseparable from mood.

To understand a little about colour, 

attend to the great master of colour in cinema of the twentieth century, 

Vittorio Storaro.
Do continue through to where he speaks of discovering who you are.
And speaks of his discovery of his own ignorance and self-discovery
as a path to maturity.

This week we ventured into the crowds at Piazza di Spagna. A place of great beauty, though it's so easy to be swept up in the mood of the crowd, see only the crowd, my crowd or the crowd of others.
This occasion very happy, not too crowded.
Colour shapes the crowd and mood, shaped by the sky, whatever mood. See what I mean.

This next embedded movie is set a tiny bit in Africa, a lot next to the Spanish Steps,
and very very deeply in the heart. There is a lack of special effects and Hollywood:
It goes mysteriously and gently: a magic of light and colour and two special actors.
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Storaro as a gift to the world

and
Moravia + Bertollucci + Storaro
taking the anti-fascist novel Il Conformista of Alberto Moravia, 

the major Roman writer of the twentieth century

to show how people can slide graciously into fascism.

WARNING, THIS IS NOT FOR ALL

The insidious process of that story – the violent outcome of a refined man's pursuit of "fitting in" with power – has lessons for us now. 

Norman Mailer said, in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, February 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq:

Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

Smiles on the Spanish Steps 25 October 2018

Happiness

She danced, I caught it on a movie with her parents smiling,
but I have no parental consent, so not posted.

Then into Via del Babuino

Exchanging notes with Silenus,
whose sculpture deemed so ugly when put in place in the 1580s that people called it Babuino, a baboon.
The name stuck, to the extent that the street was eventually renamed Babuino.
Restored and recapitated in recent years.

Exchanging notes with a Chinese man. His wife, my wife in the 'Luxury Outlet' behind me.
He took my photo, I took his photo, we smiled, I went to his side of the road.
From Beijing but living in London, in investment.
We talked a little in Chinese, with his use of phone to find the word investment.
He said the economy in China was bad, things in China were bad.
He may be one of those who made money and who have run from campaigns in recent years.

outside the Hotel de Russie

and a final note from Piazza del Popolo

The Keats-Shelley Home, at the Spanish Steps

The season has changed and the mood has changed. Perhaps because it's cooler people dress up a bit more, perhaps it's just the way it is, the smaller number of people around are different people. Including cheerful Asian families. And other cheerful people, out on a sunny day, 25 October 2018.

We were with the writer family member, so we went to the house of Keats and Shelley, at the foot of the Spanish Steps.

There were, as in mud map below, other British and white American people around in Rome in this romantic era.

click to enlarge

Not just writers: Rome was the major destination of the Grand Tour, an institution that persisted for as long as only persons of means or somehow of driven purpose could make it to Italy and thus carry a badge of status, almost like but very different from the hats that can be worn by the Haji, the mark of having done the Haj.

The house is named for Keats and Shelley, you can see the bed where Keats died. Shelley drowned when his boat sank well north of Rome. He was cremated, but his heart did not burn. Mary Shelley kept Percy's heart in her desk drawer. Do note that Mary had already created the character of Frankenstein years earlier in Switzerland when on a rainy afternoon a bunch of these romantics sat around and asked each other to invent something spooky.

Byron was there, though the house does not bear his name. Perhaps because the house was set up in a time of mush and gush about the romantics, a time when Byron was still regarded as just a bit wild. As indeed he was, his major work Don Juan was an attack on the establishment back in England and the dedication was suppressed in his lifetime. He left the comforts and loveliness of Rome to become a hero in the Greek war of independence. And die there.

It's nice to imagine these guys sitting up here, checking the queue on the steps of people lining up to get their books signed,
sending the major domo down to manage the queue, asking for tea to be brought from
Mrs Babbington's Tea Room over on the other side of the steps
...though I'm not sure that Mrs Babbington had arrived then yet.