Rome City
Join us for a walk through the ancient
Campus Martius, site of some of mankind’s finest monumental architecture, and
some of
Let your steps take you back in time as you witness the wonders
of the Pantheon and the
And yet as you walk the streets of this
vibrant, chaotic and very much alive city, and take delight in its faces –
faces including yours, which it has seen, in some form or another, for
centuries – remember that to have a sense of our past is not only to better
understand our present, but to glimpse the hazy outlines of our future. It is to recognize ourselves in the past,
with the hope that we may come to know it well enough that we will not be
condemned to repeat it.
Echoes . . .
Though the ancient Romans were
meticulous records-keepers and writers of their own history, due to the burning
of the libraries at Alexandria and Ephesus, no one knows the extent of what was
lost. During the fall-out of classical
civilization, the preservation and study of ancient texts and inscriptions was
left largely to the Roman Church. The
knowledge of antiquity was thus filtered to history through the often
vandalistic hands of the medieval clergy, for whom many of its implications
posed a threat to the power base that supported them. It was in this period that the best of
Greco-Roman sculpture was burned in lime-kilns, and entire texts of Livy’s
‘History’ were scraped from bronze tablets and replaced by prayers to the
Virgin Mary.
As a result, one of the necessary ways to get
a sense of Classical civilization is through its surviving art, which gives an
indication of the mental and spiritual state of the time in which it was
created. Architecture being the primary of
the three fine arts as defined by the Greeks – followed by Sculpture and
Painting respectively – the Romans’ buildings, no less than their histories,
define the image they had of themselves, of their civilization, and of their
relationship to the past. Buildings
easily contrasted with the irregular hodgepodge of chaotic structures built
into their ruins during the Dark Ages.
Roman
architecture was the tangible shape of an intrinsic Roman trait – the desire to
order the experience of life, to logically adjust one thing with another. The Romans not only created social and
political mechanisms, but architectural ones that excluded as far as possible
the incomprehensible and disruptive, creating spaces where they might consider,
debate and act upon the very real and never entirely solved problems that arise
among men. The relationship of place,
position and direction between man and building in this system are as old as
the clearing of the first open ceremonial space which became the Forum. This was the core of their civilization, just
as their civilization is the core of ours.
And yet the statues and paintings which
decorated these buildings often evince a phenomenal sensitivity towards Nature,
and an acknowledgement of the deep mystery of the world. A sensibility easily contrasted with the
stiff, surrealistic, hell-and-damnation-ridden art of the Medieval period; not
to mention the neurotic, desperately extrovert, individualist and egocentric
art of our own times, perhaps the greatest exponent of which, Francis Bacon,
once said that, ‘These are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and
not those which we account ancient, by a computation backwards from ourselves.’
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