The Drive-in Basilica

There are times in this city where you simply drop everything you were thinking, serious and silly, and just say, “Hey, I’m in Rome,” and it’s enough to make you smile. Things slow down, and the manic rush of traffic boiling around the Colosseum just doesn’t matter anymore. You start noticing things. The outline of a Romanesque campanile against a delicate sky of shardlike plumes of cloud. A flock of little pilgrims in matching red ball caps. A Franciscan with an Adidas backpack. Or St. Christopher painted on the side of a tour bus in hues of green like some sort of sacred Jolly Green Giant.

It happens in the evening when skies turn to salmon-pink and buildings die into purple shadows, just like it happens at the start of the afternoon siesta when the big slab of pizza you picked up in the Ghetto starts to catch up with you. You notice things, lots of things, dozens of things—but somehow they don’t come crashing down on your head in an insane baroque blur of motion. You’re in no hurry, and they aren’t either. The Mannerist molding-profiles ain’t going anywhere either.

I was walking towards the Lateran the other afternoon, ostensibly gathering research for the final project of the year, where I glanced off the roaring Via dei Fori Imperiali, with its cluttered souvenir stands and Iranian fruit vendors peddling moist coconut fragments from tin fountains, when I noticed the Basilica of SS. Cosmas and Damian was open. I was supposed to go there for a station mass last week, but the combination of sloth, a late project and the fact that it was starting at 7 AM had made me think better of it and pull the sheets higher in my stuffy hotel room.

So I wanted to see what I’d missed. It’s not much to look at from the outside: a large fascist-classical portal set into a rambling series of monastic buildings built into the edge of the Forum. The whole complex backs up on the round temple of Romulus with its porphyry-purple columns and densely ornate architrave, more refinedly Byzantine than brashly Roman. Oh, yes, it’s not the Romulus, but some Roman emperor’s kid who died young and got deified because, I suppose, his dad knew the right people.

I was a bit surprised to discover that SS. Cosmas and Damian appears to be the only basilica, major or minor, with its own attached car-port. The arch concealed a lazy, little monastic vestibule with a small mini parked just inside, with Roman nonchalance. I glimpsed a refectory through a side-door, prosaic Grandma’s house furniture in contrast to the ornate gilded candlesticks and crucifix set on a sideboard.

I found myself in a quiet cloister, surprisingly cool and quiet away from the traffic and tourist racket of the street. I circled the courtyard, slowly drinking it in and wishing I could simply take a book and sit there all afternoon and watch the sun change on the gritty, pleasant stucco shaded somewhere between peach and pink in faded paint. A fountain dribbles quietly, droplets of water following slowly from the mossy, green-furred mouths of lioncels amid a forest of potted palms in big bulging amphorae. Even under the mottled cloudy sky it seems tropical. Dark, indistinct frescoes still hung between a few arches like tapestries, while a few painted saints peered around at me from the backs of pilasters. I finally reached the basilica after following a typically Roman series of directional arrows and stepped into the grey afternoon darkness of the nave. Cool, almost chill on this grey, luminously cloudy day.

Somewhere in the distance, the occasional bustle of the sacristy leaked unconcernedly into the church, sounds like vague whistling, the purr of a telephone, but oddly this somehow made the church’s silence seem even more palpable and even more casually unhurried. Very Franciscan, in a sense. There’d been an emaciated, dancing Brancusi-modern statue of their founder set up by the entrance. It seems that the monastery and basilica belongs to the Third Order Regular of the Franciscan Friars, better known for their sober charism of noble austerity, but the church is nonetheless a miracle of that faded Roman exuberance that offers both joy and rest to the tired eye and mind.

Admitted, to the uninitiated eye, the dilapidated magnificence of grimy Counterreformation plasterwork in so many churches in Rome might prove taxing. But Cosmas and Damian’s home here belongs to that era of equilibrium between the cerebral sophistry of the Renaissance that seems inhuman and the nervous, ecstatic energy of the Baroque that to others might be a little too human. For me, somehow, the basilica’s encrustations of curling acanthus and cherub-headed escutcheons caged by so many eggs and darts in neat and surprisingly mannered Mannerist frames has all the old cozy familiarity of steaming meat pies on a chill winter evening at home, or a broken-in sofa in a twilit room.

Whatever you call it, Counterreformation, proto-Baroque, late-Renaissance, Mannerist, whatever, it’s a good break from so many billowing bishops. While restrained, nonetheless, it never quite lets you go, like sitting in silence with family and friends who you know too well to need to speak. Aloud, anyway.

The first thing you notice, however, isn’t terribly stimulating: there’s a great window at the far end of the nave looking in on the old vestibule, the gutted temple of Romulus. It’s been tiresomely restored with bland and disappointing thoroughness so the public can see every last bit of the original walls—that the Romans would have covered up with marble revetment.

At the top, it’s cold and almost Palladian with the few remaining bits of stucco adhering to the dome, at the bottom it’s just more dull brick stumps. A helpful placard notes its complete restoration, though that phrase is followed by a curiously bracketed question-mark as if perhaps the restorers themselves weren’t quite sure what they were doing. A few of Urban VIII’s bees and suns cling tenuously to the rim of the oculus, adding a bit of charm to an otherwise preposterously empty museum-exhibit. But turn around, and the whole world changes. You sit in a pew and find yourself mellowing perceptibly.

The eye slowly follows the tromp l’oeil curves of palm leaves, the gentle bulging shadows of the stucco laurels and torch-bearing baby angels in relief that line so many pilasters, gold on grey and grey on gold, both hues equally tarnished and delightfully dirty so the little pudgy putti have grubby knees—and grubby everything else—like their real-life counterparts playing soccer in the street. Perhaps that’s a literary fancy so close to the childless dead space of the Forum, but, well, surely there must be some playing soccer somewhere in Rome.

But nonetheless. You simply take this all one piece, one volute, one cyma, at a time, in slow, relaxed contemplation. Even the most silly of details earns a certain charm in this mood, like the winking, artificially quivering orange flame enclosed in the rayonnant light bulb crowning a grubby silver side-chapel lamp worked with little seraph-heads. But this, even with the flickering fake flames and the faintly operatic—Gaston Leroux rather than Andrew Lloyd Webber—electric fittings that snake and snarl above the dark stations of the cross in their little golden frames, is not a kitsch church. One glance at the venerable, miniature organ lofts that stand above you on either side of the glassed-in old vestibule refutes all that with the gentle paternal authority of a grandfather clock.

Someone’s vacuuming somewhere in the convent, and I can hear it. It’s oddly therapeutic.

Where was I? Oh yes, the organs. The pale light falls diagonally across the organs, gleaming on the thicket of sensible pipes, on its bright gold and sea-grey, sea-green cases festooned with sober, naïve little half-Mexican angels and near-baroque arabesques starting to spill every which way but not quite as free as they would find themselves in the days of Cavaliere Bernini. And above all on this curious instrument is the shield of the penitents of the Third Order with their emaciated twists of the Crown of Thorns and the robed arm of St. Francis, the alter Christus, and the bare limb of Christ.

And what of Christ Himself? The eye continues its lazy trek along the line of empty confessionals with their odd foam-green curtains, past the shabby pulpit standing high and dry and empty too almost twelve feet in the air above the congregation, and you come finally to the high altar where God reposes in a gilt and ebony tiered casket that seems like some courtly Renaissance kunstkammer full of esoteric sea-shells and magic coral.

It’s topped by a dome, as if to echo the gutted temple of Romulus with its little rim of Barberini-era stucco-work, but this temple holds life rather than neatly-restored, lifeless history. As if to accentuate this point, sprays of white flowers, fresh amid the genteel, arrested decay of the church, surround Him, striking against the black marble colonettes and nesting pediments above with their deep Corinthian brackets. Two lazy, overfed grey stucco cherubim loll at the top while a faded image of God the Father looks in gently at a narrow frame below. An Emperor and His Son: Romulus and his bare monument seem rather silly now in comparison.

And beyond? The altar and reredos are actually free-standing, and beyond is a shallow apsidal curve of well-polished choir-stalls surmounted by a register of canonized nuns in baroque frames. And then above in the semi-dome, the tranquility slowly explodes. It’s an ancient mosaic, or looks it anyway; it’s too archaeologically correct to be authentic, so I suspect it’s quite modern. But it’s perhaps the best in Rome whatever age it stems from, half-Christian Constantine or half-pagan Benito. Christ hovers in golden robes on a great river of sunset-red and noon-cerulean clouds—like, one almost feels, the spilling of blood, though one hates to break this reverie with violence, even the sacred violence of the Passion, however pervasive and necessary it is. But the blood is glorified and transfigured, as inviting and romantic as a beach sunset, and twice as joyfully solemn.

Here we see the glorified Christ, and the hot scarlet of the Passion has been transfigured into peacock magnificence, the blood-red of Passiontide into the flamingo-pink of Laetare Sunday or the purple of the Second Coming. And beneath Him, we see Peter and Paul and Cosmas and Damian draped in snuff-violet and senatorial white. The two brothers, doctors and martyrs, come forward with heavy gilt laurels outstretched in cloth-swaddled hands like a priest in a humeral. They lack the delightful Renaissance red caps familiar to us from so many Medici commissions and instead have returned to their ancient, gracefully prosaic roots. They all have the curious abstract intensity of Romano-Egyptian tomb portraits, gazes fixed on us rather than God above. And out of one corner against the deep blue mosaic sky, peeps out the face of Pope Felix looking like Santa Claus, pink and bearded among all these unfamiliar Levantine faces. Christ, after all, was no bland Norseman, and come to think of it, neither was St. Nick.

And yet, and yet, amid all these dark eastern faces, one hardly feels frightened at all. God’s black-eyed glance and Cosmas (or is it Damian?) with his frown are telling us that it its time we took up our burdens again and stepped back into the real, hurried world we left a few steps behind us, when we entered the only basilica in the world with its very own attached garage.