View from Palatine Hill, Rome *Hello readers, this is very different from anything I’ve ever posted on here, but the creative bee stung me. Enjoy. Xx. Dedicated to CB On my last day in Rome, I walked into the "Mercati di Traiano", a small, virtually empty, museum about Emperor Trajan’s legacy. As I read the inscription explaining the origin and inspiration behind a fresco, an ennoncé caught my eyes. It simply said, “Romans kept their stories written in stone”. Stories written in stones. It is simply true when you think about it. All the sculptures, the carved messages in marble, the columns, the frescos… were made with the intention of sharing a story about the Gods or the Emperors’ successes in battle in order to teach the younglings about their past and their faith. In a population that was mostly illiterate this made sense. It was easy to understand the meaning of coloured carvings depicting a gruesome battle or a scene of everyday life. These artifacts were made to communicate. While it was mostly for the propaganda of war or for religion, they had a clear intent and audience. Perhaps, they even thought that one day, a 21st-century girl would stumble upon them with admiration in a museum two thousand years later. However, most of the tourist sites I visited in Italy were not created with that desire to share stories for posterity. The Colosseum, the Diocletian and Caracalla Baths, the Pompeii ruins, Ostia Antica, the Mercati di Traiano itself… all of these were buildings used every day by everyday people. Yes, they were well-designed and had an artistic component to it, but they were mostly practical and grand enough to show the power of the current leader. Yet, we have transformed them in objects of our human curiosity for the olden days. Just in 2017, seven million people visited the Coliseum in Rome. How and why did we turn these buildings into stories? Why are we fascinated by things that would be mundane to the people of the time? Is the only reason why we still visit the Colosseum is for its astronomical size (although it is not the biggest of its kind), or do we want to see something more, a remnant of our past? Ostia Antica, Ostia I can’t pretend to have the answers. This is just a thought experiment, really. However, I can speak for myself and what moved me the most when visiting all those sites left partially destroyed by millenniums of war, greed and pillage. Let me take the ruins of Ostia as an example. Ostia used to be the main harbour of Rome. It shipped olive oil, cereals and garum (fermented fish sauce) across the Mediterranean. However, it declined in importance after Constantine I took its status of municipe which granted it some political and economic autonomy. When walking through the old city which is now almost entirely destroyed, I couldn’t help but feel haunted. This is a place where people lived, traded, ate, danced, sang, played music, laughed, cried, screamed. There used to be so much, now the walls that survived are barely standing. Ever since we were born, we heard the legends of the Greeks and the Romans. How they were the most forwarding-thinking builders, how they wielded the glaive like no other, how they built empires that lasted for thousands of years and conquered territories across three continents. We somehow idolize these societies, forgetting how much was wrong with them like the lack of human rights, slavery, high illiteracy rates and unsurmountable societal divisions. We are left with the legends of the fierce gladiators, the astute traders, the innovative architects. We would like to get back to that level of prestige, to the idea that we could one day build palaces and piazzas in the finest marble decorated with paintings from our era’s most prominent artists. Projects like these don’t really exist anymore. To replicate something with the look and the standing of Palatine Hill would be ridiculously expensive and impossible in our socio-economic context. Nowadays, our biggest constructions are stadiums, shopping malls and factories. We have lost the art of joining beauty with practicality. View of the Colosseum from Palatine Hill, Rome It is not just this sense of being dumbfounded, probably similar to witnessing an extraterrestrial landing that drags tourists back to these sites. It is not just the grandeur and the uniqueness of the artifacts that make them unique. There is something more, something sentimental. I am a fan of the idea of cultural memory. It is the thought that all of our societies carry an understanding, a shared conception, of certain events of the distant or not-so-distant past. Even if those conceptions are always evolving as history makes more discoveries and refines its most prominent theories, we still hold a strong attachment to our past. Cultural memory does not justify or glorify necessarily the horrors of history. The humans and the emotions they choose to attach to those events do. The concept simply points out that we share a common background, a base, of knowledge that has always united us. We are bound together by history’s important events from 9/11 to the fall of the Habsburg dynasty. In the case of the Romans, it is undeniable to separate them from us, especially in North America. Their history is everywhere even when we don’t realize it. From banks that still look like temples to Nike shoes named for the Roman goddess, their culture is everywhere around us. The question of why we still revisit these myths constantly then arrises. Why do we keep the Romans around in our cultural memory? Part of the answer lies in its grandeur like I explained previously, but I think it is mostly to remind us of where we came from, what we could be, but mostly what our faith could be. Amphoras, Pompeii We don’t visit old sites to admire their beauty, but almost to understand why we lost it. What happened to Pompeii? What happened to the Colosseum, why is it full of holes? Why did temples crumble? Most importantly, why did we lose it all? Humans good a love mystery. Turn on the television and you’ll see an endless series of shows about crimes or unsolved cases. We are all a little bit macabre. However, with these shows, the stories are often so insane that it is hard to believe that it could one day happen to us. What are the true odds of ending murdered by a serial killer? Zero to none, I believe. (Knock on wood). When we look at the Romans, it does seem unlikely that a sudden invasion of barbarians could come and crush us all, but it is not impossible to see the crumbling of those that were once powerful. In my lifetime, I have seen war between Sudan and South Sudan, the fall of what once was the powerhouse of the Middle East, Syria, and the expulsion and calculated extermination of the Rohingya population by a Nobel Prize Winner, just to name a few. While this might sound a defeatist, I think we keep the memories of Roman civilization around to remind ourselves of what we lost. Barbarians are not there anymore, but human greed and violence still very much is. We need to remind ourselves of what we are capable of if we let our hatred overrule us. Sure, the Barbarians were a powerful force, but the Roman Empire was killing itself from the inside too. I don’t like to write history with “ifs” but a united force is always almost unstoppable.
Now, you can choose to see this in a negative way. Yes, humans are capable of the worst, but I think our capacity to remind ourselves of the horrors while admiring the good parts is one that speaks louder than our flaws. We learn from our mistakes. Sometimes it takes a while, but we always get there. To admire, to remember and to learn, that is why we still visit the Colosseum.
1 Comment
Libellus
9/14/2018 08:01:16 am
Thank you so much for your kind words <3
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