Eternal City 3-D

How wonderful to live in a city with hills, I thought as I stood at the top of the Quirinale this afternoon. Below me, faded slightly by a delicate haze of mist, rose Rome's hundred domes amid the mazelike roofs of temements, palazzi and overgrown terrace gardens. The irregular, sloping piazza in front of the Presidential Palace was almost deserted, traffic roaring up the Via XX Settembre at my back.

It was a spectacular view, the cupolas drifting towards the grand crescendo of Saint Peter's. Beyond the Vatican I could even glimpse the severe geometric aerials of Vatican Radio crowning one of the low round towers of one of the old papal fortifications. Against the distant fringe of the umbrella trees of the Janiculum and the Vatican gardens, it could have been some blasted, picturesque ruin out of the backdrop of a Giorgione altarpiece. The sky was a melancholy, pearly grey, adding to the rich blue tints that hung over the gargantuan basilica.

It's odd to realize that, as you consider the scene, you're standing level with the eyes of the verdigrissed St. Paul that now stands atop the old weatherbeaten marble column of Antonius Pius off the Corso, or almost even with the bell-cote of Palazzo Montecitorio, the seat of the Italian parliament. The figurehead President of Italy may have his immense, starkly Renaissance residence atop the Quirinale, but the real power lies with the politicians lurking down beneath at his feet. Pleasant irony.

Tramping around Tuscany and Umbria, it seemed every new town meant a new and different slog up a steep, cobbled and treacherous street to the centro storico. And yet, I'm grateful for Italy's hills. Tallahassee, my own humble home town, claims to be founded on seven hills like Rome (and like Rome, attempts to identify those seven hills are notoriously vague) but there's nothing like this at home. Indeed, Europe's great civic hills are part of the glories of the continent. Toledo, Rothburg, Mont-Saint-Michel, Rome, these fortified mountains might be a pain on the walker, but they hang in the imagination far longer than gridded Washington or even the surprisingly flat mile-high city, Denver.

It's part of the eternal conflict between Paris's razor-straight streets with their wonderful Napoleonic bombast and Rome's crooked, marvelous scenography that manages to be both intimate and grandiose. The French model, the brainchild of men like L'Enfant and Haussmann, for better or worse, too hold in our own nation. It has its glories, it must be admitted, as everyone loves to sing of the Champs-Elysees or has their own romantic vision of the pre-revolutionary splendor of St. Petersburg's mathematical street-plan. Nonetheless, Rome remains a potent rebuke to this way of making cities.

For what it's worth, each city has its failures. Every Roman despises the Paris-straight Via de Concelazione with its suppository-shaped obelisks and the Via XX Settembre beyond the Quirinale is a concatenation of buildings, albeit marvelous ones, with little conceivable sense of order. Likewise, those part of Paris most like Rome are also troublesome: the Latin Quarter, while quaint, ended up as a suicidal labyrinth during the riots of the 1960s. And while Montmartre may have Sacre Coeur, it hardly bristles with the mind-boggling assemblage of famous churches that step out on every Roman street-corner to greet you.

The crux of this difference is that Rome was a city built by sculptors, and Paris designed by engineers, civil servants and artillerists looking for clean lines of fire. It's a fact rather than a rebuke: one might cynically remark about the French temperament that it speaks volumes that they would let their civic art be legislated by pencil-pushers, but it's equally potent that France's civil servants would be poetic and artistic enough to pull such a grandiose stunt off. Likewise, given artistic melancholia, it's more than a little frightening to think of the folks at the National Endowment for the Humanities taking over the Department of Highway Safety.

Fortunately, Bernini and Borromini were not members of the NEA, and their city is a miracle of beauty--beauty shooting out in three directions. It's a sculptural city, relationships connecting across twisting streets and over acres of tiled roofs as lantern answers lantern, cornice answers cornice, and bronze apostles size each other up on marble stilts. The whole landscape of hills and hollows is as grandly interlocking as the folds of St. Teresa in Ecstasy.

Yes, hills have their problems. You can get stuck down beneath them, for one. They get in the way for sure. In Paris, and in so many cities across our own nation, the sky is grand, expansive. Denver, out west, is Big Sky Country, while from Montmartre you can see all the world spread beneath you like a carpet. But Rome's more complex than that. Sometimes the sky is little more than a slit between overhangs, like an urban, artificial canyon. But even that seems as sweet and beautiful and heartbreaking as the grand view I'd witnessed on the Quirinale.

This evening, I looked up to find three or four of my fellow students crowding on the Studio Balcony, gaping upward, cameras in hand. Sunset. The sky was an electric jellyfish pink streaked with pale blue marbling above the tiered silhouettes of the apartments. We could see a tantalizing expanse of the grand canvas down the street towards Piazza della Valle. Hardly expansive on either hand, hemmed in by a bulwark of tiled roofs, railed balconies, overgrown terraces, iron rails, all washed by a thin blue layer of shadow. A filigree of television receivers sprouted from the uppermost levels, while the black shapes of birds whirled against the neon sky.

Big skies, it seems, are best seen through a little frame.