PARTISAN REVIEW
must remain outside it, that I could not reach across that wall of old
sacredness, and was content to be amazed and to go away. But Rome
makes everything initially so easy and yet ends by being the greatest
enigma of all.
And this is not because the past has made a camouflage city over
the "real" one, an historic patina barring the depths to the city's inner
life. I had expected it to be so, but what is astonishing here is the
realization that all these streets and streets of gray, Baroque church
fronts, old stones, arches, inscriptions, temples, palaces are casually
interwoven with the greater modem city and are entirely lacking in
the "picturesque." The city is not
grand.
Except for that hideous birth–
day cake, the Vittorio Emanuele monument, and the great sweeping
roads which Mussolini erected to the Colosseum, there is nothing im–
perious about Rome as there is about Washington or the Paris laid out
by Baron
Hauss~ann.
The greater part of it has a softly informal qual–
ity, as if the stone had rotted over the dark cramped streets like vege–
tation, and the overripe gourds of Baroque churches had begun to
melt at the edges, emitting a thin juice of blood and dirt. The city
always seems small without ever being compact. It was not until I
came to the Pincio along the park, and looked down on the city, with
its domes, obelisks, and spires upflashing in the sun like an heraldic
coat of arms, that I realized how enormous are those churches which,
when you pass their doors, seem to obtrude, each over its -little front
of street, like an old chatelaine barring the way.
It is perhaps just this long inner weathering, softening, crampening
that makes the city immediately so
easy,
as if it had been used up and
used up, generation after generation, and now had no pretense with
anyone. Yet it is in this very blandness and intimacy with which Rome
takes you in, this lack of outward "surface," that ambiguity begins.
Here the remains of the successive generations have been piled up and
piled up with such indifference that they finally melt into equivalent
phases of the same weariness with time. People say: "How amazing
that the various periods blend so well." How amazing, rather, that the
city should still be able to absorb them all and keep us equidistant in
time from each. The obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo is as "Roman"
now as the great stone goddess dumped into a corner of the courtyard
of the Palazzo Venezia; the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Campi–
doglio, the Palazzo Faroese, the temple of the vestal virgins along the
Tiber, that great heap of Latin Rome set up like a goldfish bowl in
the middle of the Piazza Argentina, those Baroque churches on the
Corso, behind those sooty fronts of European gray which always look
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