I don’t know where you start with Rome. It’s just too full of churches, statues and fountains; a history that tells us much about who we are today; and so many wonderful scenes of cafés and grand buildings, that you hardly know where to begin.
No matter how long you stay there you have to realise from the very start that you won’t be able to see it all, and that you’ll probably understand even less. The city has so many layers, and there’s so much thought and belief to go along with it all, that the only term I can find to describe it is to say that Rome is almost unimaginably “dense”.
But of course, it’s also wonderful, and beautiful, and so enchanting that you’re more than happy to just amble the streets, looking at one amazing or beautiful or ancient thing after another, not knowing where you’ve been or where you’re going, and not much caring, if truth be told.
The Tiber will never be the Seine, and Rome doesn’t have that intimacy you find in Paris. But the place is equally charming, and dare I say it, more stylish, and the Italians just seem to enjoy being there so much. Best of all, there’s no city I’ve ever been in that’s so well suited to just walking around.
There hardly seems to be a derelict area, or ugly building, or paper-filled sidewalk anywhere in the urban centre. Every block draws you on, and the only problem comes when you reach a corner. You’re confronted with almost too many options. Ancient ruin? Renaissance tower? Trendy boulevard? Which way do you turn?
This really is the place that was made for la dolce vita (the sweet life). Although since Rome is at least 3000 years old, maybe it was la dolce vita that was made for it.
And here’s the other thing – given its antiquity, it’s amazing that Rome is both so well-preserved and works so well. What other city in the world can lay claim to having such a long history, with vast numbers of famous sites, and still function as a stylish and modern place for millions of people to live?
The Italians are remarkable people, and nowhere is this more evident than in Rome. They may be down on themselves (and their politics) most of the time, and the rest of us might enjoy putting the boot in once in a while, too, but you have to take your hat off to them.
They’ve been wonderful custodians for a lot of what we prize in at least two of the greatest periods of history the world has ever known. And for that alone we owe them a major debt of gratitude.
ooOOoo
Campo de’Fiori is my favourite piazza (or square) in Rome. It means literally “field of flowers”, and for centuries it has been the city’s flower market. During the day it also sells fruit and veggies, and wonderful porchetta (spiced and sliced pork roll) on a bun.
At night it’s a great place to have drinks, a meal, and if you go just around the corner, true gelato made with natural ingredients, rather than the artificially flavoured and overly whipped concoction sold to tourists almost everywhere else.
What hardly anyone takes much notice of, though, is the large statue right in the centre of Campo d’Fiori. I always find that quite remarkable, since it has the most foreboding presence for a public monument you’re likely to see anywhere.
Maybe it’s the cape, and the way the man being depicted seems to be almost hiding under it. Maybe it’s just that it doesn’t fit in with all the surrounding spectacle. Whatever the reason, I have spent several afternoons in the Campo watching tourists, and few if any look up at this brooding figure, let alone take the time to read the inscription on the plinth.
The statue is of Giordano Bruno, one of the seminal thinkers in the early history of science, even though these days he has been eclipsed in the public imagination by Copernicus and Galileo. But as far as getting things correct about the universe, he leaves those two far behind.
Bruno didn’t just theorise that the earth revolves around the sun. He posited that all the stars in the sky are also suns, and they have solar systems rotating around them, just the way ours does. And he contended that those stars were in a universe that was in effect infinite, so our world could not be its centre.
He was a scholar and an iconoclast, and also from all accounts didn’t suffer fools gladly, so of course he rubbed the powers-that-be very much the wrong way. At that time, of course, those powers resided in the Vatican.
So when after years of study and lecturing in various places in Europe, including a stint at Oxford, he made the fatal mistake of returning to supposedly more liberal Venice, he was denounced by a leading patrician and transported under guard back to Rome for a show trial that lasted seven years.
Unlike Galileo, who faced the same inquisition 20 years later, Bruno refused to recant, and more than held his own against the Vatican’s leading scholars. At least one historian has claimed he suffered the ultimate penalty because he so embarrassed his inquisitors.
But whatever the reason, on Ash Wednesday, 1600, the Church hung Giordano Bruno upside down, clamped his tongue in a vice, and burned him at the stake in Campo d’Fiori, right where his statue now stands.
As you can imagine, the monument itself took a much longer time (and a change in how we view the world) to see the light of day. It was the result of a decision made by officials in 1870 just after the takeover of Rome by the newly formed Kingdom of Italy, the first true pan-Italian state.
That government was very much opposed to the power and corruption of the Church that had ruled Rome for so long, so they commissioned a very different sort of statue to the ones found elsewhere in Rome. And they positioned the brooding face of Bruno, half-hidden under the hood of his cassock, so that he looks straight in the direction of Saint Peters, on the other side of the Tiber.
To this day, the Catholic Church has refused to apologise for the torture and murder of one of the most important men in science at the time, which they carried out right when the Enlightenment was beginning to change the world. The best they can manage is to say that the methods they used were “a sad episode”.
And there are still Church-supporting historians who contend it wasn’t Bruno’s views on the stars, but rather his refusal to accept Biblical teachings that resulted in him being found a heretic, as if that was some sort of justification for putting to death a famous thinker at the beginning of the 17th century.
It’s extraordinary, really. It’s as if the Church is the Flat Earth Society, and its dogma is more important than objective reality, despite Bruno’s theory having been proven conclusively by experimentation thousands of times in the centuries that followed his demise.
The history of science is full of episodes where those in power reject ideas that eventually are proven true, and religious authority certainly doesn’t have any monopoly in this regard. Often the scientist just loses his reputation and pay cheque.
Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, paid the ultimate price. He was in my view a true martyr of science at the very beginning of its rise to prominence in Western Civilisation, and he deserves to be much better known.
~originally composed in July, 2019~