The Secrets of Rome: Love and Death in the Eternal City

THE

SECRETS OF

RO M E LOVE & DEATH IN THE ETERNAL CITY

CORRADO AUGIAS TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY A. LAWRENCE JENKENS

Praise for Secrets of Rome

“A rich, layered, highly readable narrative of the world’s most beautiful city.”

Alexander Stille, author of The Sack of Rome and Excellent Cadavers

First published in hardcover in the United States of America in 2007

by Rizzoli Ex Libris, an imprint of Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 300 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10010 www.rizzoliusa.com Edited by Julie Di Filippo and Alta L. Price Jacket design: Gabriele Wilson Typesetting: Tina Henderson © 2007 Rizzoli International Publications © 2005 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano This ebook edition © 2014 Rizzoli International Publications All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publishers.

2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-4277-3

CONTENTS

I

PREAMBLE IN TWO SCENES

1

BETWEEN SPACE AND TIME

13

II

MY NATIVE LAND, I DO THE WALLS BEHOLD

43

III

TWENTY-THREE THRUSTS OF THE DAGGER

65

IV

THE OTHER MICHELANGELO

V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII

A HOUSE ALL OF GOLD

123

THE ADVENTURE OF MOSES FACTORY OF DREAMS TOWERS OF FEAR

153

178

203

“IST AM 24.3.194 4 GESTORBEN”

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THE MOST BEAUTIFUL LADY OF ROME THE RISE OF THE BOURGEOISIE “FRATELLI D’ITALIA”

253

278

299

XIII

MURDER ON VIA PUCCINI

XIV

LIFE BEYOND THE WALLS

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320 345

THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY THAT NEVER WAS

Acknowledgments 388 Index of Names and Places 389

369

C’est ici un livre de bonne foy, lecteur. . . . Je veus qu’on m’y voie en ma façon simple, naturelle et ordinaire. . . . Ainsin, lecteur, je suis moi-mesmes la matière de mon livre.

Montaigne, Essais, «Avertissement au lecteur» To the Reader You have here, Reader, a book whose faith can be trusted. . . . Here I want to be seen in my simple, natural, everyday fashion. . . . And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book.

Montaigne, The Complete Essays

EDITOR’S NOTE

This book was written, and will ideally be read, more as a novel than an essay; it’s simply a series of stories about Rome. Each of the world’s great cities has its own saga, and this book aims to recount the saga of Rome—one of the longest, most dramatic, and most fascinating in world history. Where possible, the sources of quotes and anecdotes have been included for those interested in finding out more, and readers are invited to contact the publisher should they have information for future editions of this book.That said, the sheer richness of Rome’s history, characters, and chroniclers has brought forth stories that can’t always clearly be traced back to the source.

Hopefully these tales—which resemble Rome in all its beauty, chaos, and timelessness—will unfold like a stroll through the city itself.

PREAMBLE IN TWO SCENES

Where can we begin the story of the universe that is Rome? In a city as contradictory as this, filled with all the glory, ruins, and dust left behind by past centuries, it’s possible to see traces of every human event and sentiment in its history—the bravery and cowardice, the generosity and indolence, the resourcefulness and louche limpness of the lazy. There’s not a single event in its past that hasn’t left a sign, scar, or scratch on its hide. Rome will never be a city of order, symmetry, events that unfold according to plan, or the coherent result of urban planning. If human history is nothing but violence and tumult, then Rome has been its mirror over the centuries, capable of reflecting each and every detail with painful fidelity, including those from which we would willingly look away.

So where can we begin, then? Every respectable story should start at the beginning, ab ovo as the Romans said, referring to the ovo or egg of Leda, which she laid after being seduced by Jupiter in the form of a swan. It was from this egg that Helen, the woman of such fatal beauty, was born. So let us, too, start ab ovo then, not just for chronological convenience, but also because the story, the myth of Rome’s origins, seems to contain a basic trait still recognizable after all the city’s adventures and misadventures; put simply, its destiny.

So from which of its origins shall we start? Everyone knows the legend of Romulus and Remus, but not everyone remembers the various versions of how these two legendary twins came into the world.

It seems their mother was Rhea Silvia, a princess of Alba Longa who was forced to become a nun (as they’d have said in the seventeenth century) and enter the sacred college of the Vestal Virgins, whose members, among other duties, took a vow of absolute chastity. She was forced into this by her uncle, usurper of the throne, to prevent her from bearing any heirs who might jeopardize his dynasty.

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Instead, one day the young woman found herself pregnant, supposedly at the hands of a deity (an oft-repeated explanation), perhaps Mars himself. Following these branches of the family tree, this version leads us to Ascanius, son of Lavinia and the pious Aeneas. Can we believe this? Virgil did, or so he wrote, in his epic poem on the nation’s foundation, The Aeneid.

This legend, built up little by little, is known in other, more embarrassing versions recounted by Plutarch in his Life of Romulus. One day King Tarchetius of Alba Longa, a cruel man, witnessed the astonishing appearance of a gigantic male member that descended through the chimney and began to flutter around the house. The Etruscan oracles, even without having read Freud, explained that this was the spirit of Mars who, irritated with the king, wanted to produce a successor for him. To appease the irate god the king had to offer him a virgin; Tarchetius ordered his daughter to satisfy the thing that continued to flit about, but the girl, understandably, refused. A slave girl, who didn’t have the option to say no, was called as a substitute.

These are the rather dishonorable events that led, nine months after the surreal encounter, to the birth of two boys whom the evil king, to avoid all risk, ordered to be murdered. Abandoned in a basket along the banks of the Tiber (like Moses), the twins were saved because the waters receded, and because a she-wolf, driven down from the nearby mountains by thirst, nourished them by offering her own breasts. But was she really a wolf? In his history of Rome, Livy insinuates that it wasn’t a real wolf, but rather a woman, Larenzia, whom the local shepherds called “she-wolf,” another name for prostitute, because she so often sold herself to those rude men: “Sunt qui Larentiam volgato corpore lupam inter pastores vocatam putent.”

[There are those who think that Larentia was called a she-wolf by the shepherds because she was a prostitute.] When twentieth-century Italian Fascists thought of giving the nickname “children of the shewolf ” to the children inducted into the party’s youth organization they didn’t realize, in their ignorance of history, the unintentional humor of that name.

The two boys, of less-than-flawless lineage, grew up revealing distinctly different temperaments. Remus was the more resolute, and seemed more suited to command. Romulus appeared physically weaker than his brother, but was also much more astute. When it

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came time to found the city, Romulus tricked his brother with a bet over which of them would first spot vultures in the Murcia Valley, where the Circus Maximus would later rise. The bet degenerated; Romulus reneged, and Remus was enraged. To provoke his brother, he jumped the furrow being dug to outline the city’s perimeter, and was struck down by a blow from the hoe of an Etruscan assassin.

With his brother gone, Romulus, consumed with fury, cried out, “Sic deinde, quicumque alius transiliet moenia mea” [The same will happen to anyone else who dares to trespass my walls].

Might the city’s name derive from Romulus? It’s possible, but by no means certain. Other hypotheses include the Etruscan word rumon, or river, and thus the “city of the river,” or the Oscan ruma, or hill. So the origin of the city’s name is as uncertain as the lineage of its founding twins.

Romulus brought together a bunch of misfits from all over to populate his city. According to Plutarch, each of them brought a handful of earth from his own country to throw into the pit, or mundus, that had been dug at the center of the walled enclosure. At the same time, Plutarch adds, they also tossed in the first fruits “of all things deemed good according to custom, and necessary for human life according to nature.” In this village of villains there was just one thing among all life’s necessities still missing—women. The young women of neighboring villages were invited to settle in the new city but, horrified, they refused the offer. In short, the Romans resorted to the extreme measure of kidnapping women from the nearby Sabine nation, thus allowing Rome to truly begin to live.

It took a lot to ennoble this grim story of rape and murder.

Because the story of Mars siring the twins seemed tenuous, someone wisely thought of rooting the new city in another illustrious myth, the Trojan War, somehow transforming Pious Aeneas, son of Venus, into the father of Romulus.Virgil refined this new legend by linking it, during the golden age of Augustus, directly to Homer, and by way of the Iliad gave both himself and his story a grand literary pedigree.

There’s a grain of truth in every legend, and in the case of Rome that grain tells us that its beginnings were turbulent, most likely because of its inhabitants’ aggressiveness. They made a name for themselves through violence in the new settlement, strategically located on the border between two cultures—Etruscan and Italic—

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and at the crossroads of the important commercial roads connecting Etruscan Tuscany and Greek Campania. It took centuries to create not only the city’s mythology, but also a system of laws and social norms that insured some fairness in communal life in a city whose beginnings had been so adventurous. These norms were respected for centuries, and with regard to bona fide jurisdiction Roman law remains in many ways unsurpassed to this day, as we hear in the vehement formulae that sum up some of its principle tenets: Unicuique suum (to each his own), Neminen laedere (injure no one), Dura lex sed lex (the law is harsh but it is the law), Ne bis in eadem (no one should be punished twice for the same thing), Nemo ad factum cogi potest (no one can be forced into a deed), and so on.

Although it took centuries to perfect, the light of the law began to shine in Rome. Numa Pompilius, second king of the city (sometime between 700 and 600 bc), came from the Sabine region and was the son-in-law of King Titus Tatius. When Romulus died, the Romans chose Numa Pompilius as their sovereign. Pious and pacific, he maintained good relationships with the city’s neighbors and thus guaranteed a long period of peace. In recounting the story of his life, Plutarch passes a memorable judgment on Numa’s reign that has persisted to the present day: And yet as someone will say, did not Rome progress and advance thanks to war? This is a question which would require a long response for some people who reckon progress in terms of money, luxury, and in supremacy rather than in security, kindness, independence from others and justice towards others.

King Numa was especially dedicated to the religious life of the city, and knew that divine assistance and a fear of the hereafter were both very useful in educating a primitive population about respecting the law. “Numa’s muse,” wrote Plutarch, “was gentle and humane; he converted the city to peace and justice by placating its unrestrained and fiery habits.” Remembering the outrageous behavior of the first Romans toward the women of his own nation, Numa was particularly careful to devise a restrained code of sexual behavior, reprimanding men, and especially women. “He required of [women] a great reserve and forbade them any role in public life, and he admonished them to moderation and silence.” Roman women mar-

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ried at a very early age, “at twelve or even younger because then they brought their husbands their bodies and souls pure and intact.� The modesty imposed on all young women became the stringent duty of the order of Vestal Virgins, which Numa founded.The goddess Vesta, virgin guardian of the flame, symbolized the eternity of Rome. Her priestesses were selected from amongst Roman girls of patrician families between the ages of six and ten. They were obliged to maintain their virginity for thirty years, after which they were allowed to marry. Other than tending the flame, they also became responsible, over time, for keeping watch over the Palladium, praying for the public’s health, and guarding wills and other important documents.

Great honors were reserved for them: magistrates made way for them, and the consular fasces were lowered as they passed. They had the right to be escorted by lictors, and anyone who insulted them was punished by death. A vestal virgin who violated her vow of chastity was considered guilty of incestum; her seducer was flogged to death, and she was taken to the Campus Sceleratum where she suffered a terrible punishment that Plutarch described in great detail: But she that has broken her vow is buried alive near the gate called Collina, where a little mound of earth stands inside the city, reaching some little distance, called in Latin agger; under it a narrow room is constructed, to which a descent is made by stairs; here they prepare a bed, and light a lamp, and leave a small quantity of victuals, such as bread, water, a pail of milk, and some oil; that so that body which had been consecrated and devoted to the most sacred service of religion might not be said to perish by such a death as famine. The culprit herself is put in a litter, which they cover over, and tie her down with cords on it, so that nothing she utters may be heard. They then take her to the forum; all people silently go out of the way as she passes, and such as follow accompany the bier with solemn and speechless sorrow; and indeed, there is not any spectacle more appalling, nor any day observed by the city with greater appearance of gloom and sadness. When they come to the place of execution, the officers loose the cords, and then the high priest, lifting his hands to heaven, pronounces certain prayers to himself before the act; then he brings out the prisoner, being still covered, and placing her upon the steps that lead down to the cell, turns away his face with the rest

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of the priests; the stairs are drawn up after she has gone down, and a quantity of earth is heaped up over the entrance to the cell, so as to prevent it from being distinguished from the rest of the mound. This is the punishment of those who break their vow of virginity.

In 1972 Mario Praz published his wonderful book Il patto col serpente.

Amongst the many essays in the book, one—“La Roma dannunziana” or “D’Annunzio’s Rome”—contains this evocative passage: “Sometimes I pass by a house on Via Varese adorned with sgraffito decorations, its shutters usually closed, and made sad by happy trees, pines and palms, which here seem mournful and solemn, like northern trees. No other scene I know is a more appropriate setting for a detective novel.” When the daily newspaper La Repubblica moved its editorial offices to a building on the Piazza Indipendenza, where they stayed for some thirty years, the sentence quoted above came back to me. I worked at the paper’s offices, and Via Varese was around the corner. The mysterious house was (and still is) there, halfway up the street, on the left as you come from the square. Praz was right— the house is mysterious, but even more strikingly, it seems to have nothing to do with the neighborhood (once called Macao) around it, at least as we now see it with its “dreary and melancholy streets, a derelict residential district whose villas have been converted into inexpensive hotels, schools, and offices, its decayed Corinthian columns and small parks choked by modern boxes. [Here I think Praz was referring to the building that later became La Repubblica’s offices.] Here and there, though, there is a corner that has kept some mark of distinction.”

We need only look more carefully, however, and the marks that Praz noted become clearly visible. These streets were once at the heart of a life that, although it has since disappeared, did leave behind a memory of itself. The sparse architectural remains, certain friezes, and a few views glimpsed through tall gates are its witnesses.There are a few books, too, which almost no one reads, that make reference to life there. They don’t include Il piacere (D’Annunzio’s The Pleasure), the most important work in the period immediately after 1870, which we will return to later, nor the journal Cronaca bizantina in its fleeting moment of aestheticism when D’Annunzio himself was its director (1885–1886). They do, on the other hand, include the slim

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volume by the antiquarian Alberto Arduini with the winning title Dame al Macao, first published in 1945 and never reprinted. But why the name Macao? What does Rome have to do with the former Portuguese colony in the South China Sea, long considered a place of “belle dame sans merci” and exotic adventures? The neighborhood’s name was actually taken from a Jesuit seminary built on a part of the Castro Pretorio where, from the end of the sixteenth century on, missionaries destined to serve in the Far East were educated.

It was here that the Piemontese—the new administrators of the recently united nation, from the Northern region of Piedmont— decided to build a residential neighborhood and the headquarters for the important ministries of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy. One of the principal reasons for this choice was the convenience of having the railway station close by. Its elevation, too, was important; this is the highest part of Rome, dubbed alta semita in ancient times, and its air is healthier, thanks to the 80 to 100 meters it has over the insalubrious lowlands encircled by the river bend. Here the new administrators planned a modern, rational, secular neighborhood with houses and apartment buildings for the new managerial class, the highest hierarchs of the state. It had not one single church (making Macao unique in all Rome, with only one exception we’ll discuss in the last chapter).

Statesmen and literary figures, financiers and journalists, and the “belles dames” of Arduini’s title all roamed the streets of Macao.

In the morning the lazy neighborhood awakens late. There are waiters in striped uniforms, coachmen who wash the carriages with great torrents of water, and gardeners armed with shears and watering cans. Later, ladies and gentlemen on horseback with riding hats, and parliamentarians in furs. After midday, pathetic departures for the Pincio. At five o’clock a passerby might glimpse, behind balconies draped with lace curtains, soft lights which silhouette women with bustles, pale, well-brought-up girls, and elegant gentlemen in the most restrained frock coats. Tea is served in winter gardens . . . in an atmosphere that is perfumed but never without a slight odor of gas.

The Macao described by Arduini probably never really existed.

Some of its small, elegant villas are still there, but the ambience he

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described has more a feeling of fantasy or desire than of reality.

Rome never resembled Bloomsbury, nor the small quiet streets of Paris’s Neuilly or the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Its appearance is different; it can be indolent or tragic, and has always been that way.

(Arduini himself met a violent end, murdered by an American officer in the months after the liberation over a quarrel that perhaps had to do with a relationship gone bad.) Yet even if Arduini’s Macao never was, the new Kingdom of Italy did try, in part with neighborhoods like it, to link Rome to the great metropolises of Europe—Paris, London, Berlin—finally freeing it from political and social isolation.

The ancient Rome of Romulus and Remus, as well as the Rome that disappeared with the end of the nineteenth century, were both swallowed by the vortex and dust of history. If I had to note just one feature of the city, I would point to the simultaneous presence of many cities, each locked inside the other, overlaid in three, four, or five layers ready to reveal themselves as soon as you look beyond the noisy exterior of the present.

In the Fora, after a day of heavy rain, one can see a myriad of small stones glimmering on the ground. These are fragments, little more than dust, of the multicolored marbles that over the centuries were brought here from every corner of the earth. Every excavation in the historic center of the city—be it for a building’s foundations or a subway tunnel—invariably reveals the remains of an earlier life.

Renzo Piano found this out during the construction of the new Auditorium and Parco della Musica, and Federico Fellini imagined it in his film Roma, where a Roman fresco is brought to light in the bowels of a tunnel, but that same light, in mere moments, burns its delicate surface, erasing it forever.

Only in Rome could Nero’s Domus Aurea, one of the greatest royal palaces ever constructed, be buried after just a few years of splendor to serve as the foundations of a new emperor’s baths. Only in Rome could the entrance of an apartment building constructed in 1909 be supported by a buttress belonging to the Circus of Nero, or the columns in a Christian church be taken from a temple dedicated to Venus. These multiple stratifications document an uninterrupted history all across the city, erasing and then adding, with a stubbornness that switches from gentle to violent—like the waves that relent-

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lessly batter the same stretch of coastline. In his novel Rome, Émile Zola understood this aspect of the city perfectly. His protagonist reflects: [Pierre] was again becoming absorbed in the idea he had formed of pagan Rome resuscitating in Christian Rome and turning it into Catholic Rome, the new political, sacerdotal, domineering centre of earthly government. Apart from the primitive age of the Catacombs, had Rome ever been Christian? The thoughts that had come to him on the Palatine, in the Appian Way, and in St. Peter’s were gathering confirmation. Genius that morning had brought him fresh proof.

No doubt the paganism which reappeared in the art of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle was tempered, transformed by the Christian spirit. But did it not still remain the basis? Had not the former master peered across Olympus when snatching his great nudities from the terrible heavens of Jehovah? Did not the ideal figures of Raffaelle reveal the superb, fascinating flesh of Venus beneath the chaste veil of the Virgin? 1

This layering is part of Rome’s fascination, but also its burden.

Encumbered by its own past, it has never been, nor will it ever be, easy for the city to free itself from its own ghosts. New York, which is constantly redefining itself, is not a good comparative example, but even Paris does not have the same dense ties to its own past. Until almost the year 1000 the French capital, Lutetia Parisiorum as the Romans called it, was little more than a fortified village on the Ile de la Cité, important only because of its location below the confluence of the Seine and Marna rivers. Paris is seventeen hundred years younger than Rome—seventeen hundred visible, palpable years.

This book is neither a history of nor a guidebook to Rome, rather it is a collection of events tied to a certain street, palace, monument, or in some cases to my own life—in other words, to encounters and combinations that I hope are meaningful, but that are also, like life itself, often accidental.These are places I lived, places I saw differently from the way they are now—because even Rome changes— or places I took from books and neighbors’ stories. Describing some places of the city, it was inevitable that I’d have to review parts of its troubled history, a history that has never really settled down, even

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after 1870, the year Rome became part of the Kingdom of Italy.

Sometimes I catch myself imagining what Rome might have become had it—in other centuries, such as the fifteenth and sixteenth—been the center of a kingdom freed of papal domination, able to transform itself into a truly modern capital. In those two centuries the Italian peninsula benefited from an economic and cultural energy unparalleled in all of Europe. If Machiavelli and Giucciardini’s dreams of unification had come true back then, Rome’s destiny would certainly have been different, and probably better. Their goal, however, was slowed by a complex articulation of local and regional interests and egos. Rome did become the capital, but only at the end of the nineteenth century, when Italy was experiencing a period of cultural, social, and industrial stagnation, and when it counted for very little on the international radar—even this continues to be a burden.

In this book, however, I will tell of at least two instances when the city seems to have thrown off the cloak of centuries past. The first—which erased the humiliation suffered after the fall of the Empire, the bloody battles of the Middle Ages, and the repressions following the Protestant Reformation—was the glorious and futile attempt in 1849 to found a democratic republic based on the rule of law. The second, which redeemed the outrageous vulgarity of the Fascist period, was the resistance that rose up during the nine months of Nazi occupation. You’ll find stories and summaries, personalities and episodes meant to restore the comprehensive picture of a city that has had to confront its (perhaps overly) demanding legacy—the Roman Empire, Jewish monotheism later revised by Christianity, and centuries of social inertia, ferocious anarchy, and acquiescence to the rules of those in power. Yet even this spinelessness, this resignation that often turned into indifference, has probably contributed to the fact that so many have experienced Rome as their own home—Belisarius and Totila, the Ostrogoth kings, Theodoric the Barbarian, Charlemagne and Otto the Emperor, Goethe and Montaigne, Dumas and Zola, Stendhal and Gogol, Henry James and Corot, as well as hordes of tourists, pilgrims, and artists. Of all the great cities of antiquity—Niniveh, Babylon, Alexandria,Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Antioch—Rome is the only one that has existed continuously without ever having been reduced to a semiabandoned village. Instead it was often the epicenter of events of

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global significance, and often paid a hefty toll. For more than twentyseven hundred years Rome has stood on the banks of its muddy river, at times embellished by the melancholy appeal of its ruins, at others spoiled by the sloth of its citizens. Repeatedly violated by foreign armies, destination of disorganized immigration, sometimes protagonist, sometimes slave, Rome has always managed to preserve some small trace of each passage and every period. Despite its many travails, or perhaps because of them, Rome retains its immense illusionistic, theatrical capacity.

1. Émile Zola, Rome, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/rome610.txt