Another Olympic Theater, and Fair Verona

being another stop on a journey to Venice

“…but he made of the entire city a theater, too.”

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.”

One rainy morning in Vicenza, we saw the Teatro Olimpico, a masterwork by the dying Palladio that was completed by his disciple Scamozzi. There are three theaters by that name in Italy. We had seen one already in that other curious, theatrical city, Parma. As we wound our way through the crooked Renaissance anterooms of the old fortress where the Olympic Academy had been housed. I was talking with my friend V., who eagerly asked me to tell her something about the theater as we stepped through the curtains of a side door into the base of the cavea. As I looked out, I found I could not.

I was speechless. I stuttered something, and she too understood. It was amazing. The perfect concinnitas, utter harmony, of the Renaissance backdrop crowned with statues of the Olympian academics in theatrical ancient dress, the magnificent perspectives of the angling sidestreets through the arches, the painted clouds overhead. It was a perfect mirror of reality, and we could see it in all its beauty all at once with dizzying sublimity.

The theater is a God’s eye view of the world, and if you are not God, sometimes it can be almost unbearable in its splendor. I tried to sketch, but I couldn’t bring myself to draw anything important beyond a few pilasters and obelisks, something more bearable for a mortal eye.

No wonder they call it Olympic.

However, as I remember that morning, I can’t help thinking back, not just to Parma’s theatrical spectacle, but to a silent evening I spent a few nights earlier, in Verona.

When I set out for the centro storico of Verona, I had planned to write about the logic behind the planning of traditional cities. Not consulting my map, I promptly began walking in the opposite direction from the old town across Ponte del Popolo. I was following a vast illuminated cross that seemed to hang in the sky, set atop some murky pediment I could never quite see. I had assumed it crowned the Duomo.

I checked my map at the other side of the bridge at Piazza San Tomasso, patron of doubt, and backtracked across the dark waters of the Adige. I looked back for a moment and considered the few lights speckled a vast and gloomy outcropping rising above the indistinct domes of the city’s flank.

I was neither sleepy nor hungry that evening, so I chose instead to stroll, giving my walk an unfamiliar sense of purposelessness. I had dined late and well in Mantua that afternoon under a vault festooned with the faded eagles of the Gonzaga, and planned to miss dinner that evening.

I passed the classical yellow-stucco façade of a theater as I moved down a sidestreet, the interior lights shutting off as I walked by. As I continued, I moved through a succession of empty cloistered spaces, of an eerie de Chirico futility. One of the inner courts of the old town hall. The next morning, in daylight, I saw a handful of beggars crumpled asleep under the vast loggia. I saw a long medieval stairway leading to a door crowned by a gold mosaic, the so-called scala de ragione leading to the palazzo della ragione. The stair of reason and the palace of reason, the curious Italian name for a civic assembly hall. It seemed somehow ironic in the cold, empty courtyard. Overhead loomed a tower washed with the vague illumination of golden floodlights, theatrically striped in marble and brick.

I moved out into another square, equally enclosed by elaborate arches and high, now semi-Venetian palazzi. A few tourists were taking tardy photos with underpowered digital cameras. The only other inhabitant I could see was a blank, foreboding marble Dante atop a pedestal. Dozens of memorial inscriptions and sooty escutcheons hung on the walls.

On my right hand, beneath an irrational arch that supported nothing, stood a forest of high Gothic pinnacles, a maze of knightly tombs behind an elaborate wrought iron fence. The sepulchers were raised high on pilasters, crowned by gravity-defying equestrians in full armor, the canine crest of the Scala family atop their barrel helms. Washed with moonlight from an invisible white spotlight, they seemed the perfect spot for Hamlet to seek his father or Romeo to die atop Juliet.

The disorientation continued. I finally reached the main square, seeing a strange mix of ornate Venetian and stony, sober solid comune medieval, the theatrical variety of Parma, but I also felt an overwhealming sense of abandonment. The city seemed peculiarly unreal, because the city was empty. The ornate Renaissance façade of the palazzo at the far end of the narrow piazza seemed oddly flat with its shallow shadows.

Above me, the narrow, high townhouses, floodlit by civic Klieg lights, were crowded with semi-Tudor balconies, the kind that Serlio had recommended decorate the stages of comedies because of their rude, vernacular, grab-bag nature. I had already passed through grave, sinister spaces not unlike those he had assigned for the backdrops of tragedy. I could not say sure what genre I was in, this foreboding brew of stately, gloomy classicism and crowded humor, now palled with darkness.

The piazza’s monuments were archetypal, a magnificent Venetian lion, a medieval pinnacle or two, not so much like Parma’s eclecticism as an idealized prop that could have heard the speeches of any character from Shylock to King Lear. Or Romeo.

I was in the city of Romeo and Juliet, and I realized that I was walking through an abandoned stageset. Parma might have seemed at first like a play with its erratic and mongrel changes of scenery, but Verona seemed the empty storehouse where all the dead magic of the theater had been entombed. It was no longer charming but sinister. Take a wrong turn down a passage and the buildings might be five feet or five inches high like Scamozzi’s perspectival Palladian stage-set.

One stall out of dozens was still open under a pointless umbrella, cheap wares spread out in the light. They looked mostly like sentimental alabaster figurines of the city’s two great doomed lovers passionately kissing rather than falling on one another in death.

I found what looked like the main shopping street, lit with myopically bright white lights, refrigerating this narrow band of urban fabric into a pale, wintry mall. Sidestreets trickled off into purple darkness. It was almost empty, too. I stopped in a tabacchi because it was still open and I liked the statues of knights in the window and bought a disposable camera, though I didn’t use it until the next morning. A Japanese tourist snapped pictures of the elaborate, well-lit window displays full of decapitated mannequins.

Everything seemed fleeting: the magnificent biforium windows belonged on a Folger Shakespeare Theater set, and even the ice-cream seemed insubstantial as merengue, as if the product of some bastard recipe cooked up by Estragon and Vladimir rather than Romeo and Juliet. At least I knew they bled and loved rather than the existential ghosts of modern theater.

I took a crooked dark sidestreet back from the closed city and found myself eventually back at the oddly-named and rather sinister-looking Café Bukowksi across from the hotel and drew the curtain across the evening. As I walked back, I had seen the illuminated cross across the river every time I looked down an alleyways.

I had walked through a theater, a play; and there is nothing more than being trapped in a fictional world that modern man fears. Theatrical is the worst of slurs. We crave authenticity, which means that theater, full of deception and disguise, has no place in our psyche.

Borges wrote in his “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” that it was impossible for history to imitate theater. It suggested a crack in reality, that something was dreadfully wrong. For our own part, it seems almost unimaginable today that an actor could stir up an angry populace, that Rome’s senate banned stone theaters lest they be used as fortresses by some clever demagoguing thespian. The thought of the Risorgiomento’s Italians rebelling to the “subersive” strains of Va, pensiero seem almost comic to us in retrospect.

After all, plays are about of characters that quietly disappear after the curtain falls.

We don’t have time on our schedules to be inspired by mere actors. Modern life has no room for rhetoric and ritual. It suggests duplicity, sweet-talking, scam artists. That you’re hiding something dark and hypocritical. Or worse, that you’re dreaming and taking refuge from reality in some foolish escape. Prisons require escape, and “the only people who fear escapism are jailors,” as C.S. Lewis once remarked.

More importantly, because theaters require plays, and plays require authors. We like watching plays, don’t we? We’re in control; we see everything, every last stratagem and plot, and see them collide with frightening efficiency as Oedipus staggers blindly to his doom or Medea cackles in triumph. Or perhaps, for a happier turn, when Jack has his Jill with fastidious coincidence: Hermia and Helena are finally matched to their correct mates and Bottom the weaver left in peace.

Those delightful characters that disappear after the curtain falls. It seems silly they could do anything but shock or delight us. Anyone who took them seriously seems almost as comic as those Palladian academicians atop the columns in their anachronistic togas. Artificial. Frivolous. Not authentic. Nobody could make myths a polestar for their life, we think, maybe a bit too loudly.

It is especially curious we seem so fearful about bringing theater into everyday life because the image of the city as a theater, and the theater as the world, the great theatrum mundi was a powerful image in the past, a sign which took on an almost mystical importance to any Christian humanist. Pope Alexander VII even spoke of the great Bernini square of San Pietro as, quite literally, un teatro. It’s no surprise, then, that that the word liturgy comes from the Greek word leitourgia. This is sometimes translated as “work,” but this definition is imprecise. A leitourgia was a spectacle, a theatrical work, presented for the populace’s education and enjoyment. Marx, missing the point, would dourly call it the opiate of the masses.

Yes, theater is about deception, disguise and frivolity. And funny, funny people. Of course. But it’s also about something else. It’s about virtue and vice, order and reason. We’d sooner forget about that, but it is that trickle of lifeblood that endures when Bottom’s donkey-headed ghost has been consigned to the costume trunk. It’s about virtue and vice and order, because every play has a logic, because every play has a story, and every story has a moral. And every story also has an author.

We don’t like to think about that last point, especially in our own lives. After all, God is the author of the longest-running play in history, which is history. Too many issues, and too much at stake to fill our minds.

Theater is hieratic, orderly, where hubris brings down the prideful and the sacrifices of the downtrodden and the deeds of the valiant—whether Antigone, Don Quixote or even our friends Romeo and Juliet. are memorialized with the holiness of a martyrology. Piety, loyalty, chivalry, love. In short, all the things that make life bearable. True theater is civilization.

God is the author of the great play that is the world; it can be almost frightening to realize this. But only until we realize He also willed himself to be a character in that same play, for our own sake.