Rome is a body, freshly exhumed, straddled on all sides by leering police.<\/p>\n
Rome is dominated by ruins: the forum is a boneyard, the colosseum a headstone, the Aurelian walls fence in the hallowed ground. Few visible works predate the emperor Trajan, who lived to see Rome reach its territorial maximum, saw it begin its long decline. The archaelogical mode in Rome is to unearth, to lay out before us whatever can be found, as it was found. Reconstruction is mostly confined to pathetic medieval attempts to extract from the pagan monumenta<\/em> a bit of glory for Christ. There are the shrines\u2014and later a church\u2014built on the floor of the colosseum, at a time when the inner corridors were turned into barns for sheep\u2014and temples rededicated as shrines or churches\u2014though these lack their fine marble facings and bronze ceilings they had in an earlier era.<\/p>\n The ongoing excavation of the Domus Aurea is the most striking Roman corpse. Nero was not so much a madman as the first disaster capitalist<\/a>. After the great fire of 64 C\u2014a fire that may have been started by the emperor’s confederates\u2014Nero seized a full third of Rome for a pleasure palace, a ‘golden hall’. Years later, Trajan, by comparison a great liberalizer and homo populi<\/em>, razed Nero’s colossal artificial lake and set to construct an amphitheatre that later became the colosseum. As for the halls of the Domus, Trajan stripped them of their marble facings and filled them with rubble, and they became the foundations, and the sewers, for a great public bath. The only hint of their one-time splendor are the fine frescoes that can be seen on weekend tours offered while the excavators rest.<\/p>\n Standing over the ancient Roman corpse are a huge mass of police, of which there are both far too many and far too many types. There is the esercito\u2014<\/em>the army\u2014of whom it is said, “at least they are competent”. There are carabinieri<\/em>, who use the iconography of musketeers but whose portfolio includes roles played by state troopers and sheriffs, the DEA and the FBI, the Pinkertons and second-world paramilitaries. And there are also polizia<\/em> and guardia<\/em>. As far as one can tell, small bands of the various armed forces have been camping at their chosen corners for years, doing little more than smoking cigarettes and talking amongst themselves. The duplication of effort is exquisite, and not without a bit of apparent dispute over turf. One will not uncommonly find an entrance to a church guarded over by the esercito<\/em> and the exit by polizia<\/em>. The effect would be chilling were the patient not so long dead, so long in the ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rome is a body, freshly exhumed, straddled on all sides by leering police. Rome is dominated by ruins: the forum is a boneyard, the colosseum a headstone, the Aurelian walls fence in the hallowed ground. Few visible works predate the emperor Trajan, who lived to see Rome reach its territorial maximum, saw it begin its … Continue reading “A first impression of Rome”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":804,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions\/804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}