Rome, Day 22

I prefer the Pre-Romantic Romanticized Rome of Piranesi, from around 1750.

A clever book, ancient Roman Monunents Past and Present with 15 Reconstructions (Staccioli, 2022) of famous historic/tourist sites reveals how impossible it is to imagine the Rome of the pass by looking at the meagre remnants of Rome in the present.

Going towards the dome of Saint Peter’s. Faces in the crowd going in: motley, the unsupported in societies, less educated, less beautiful, of groups.

From on the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica the late teen American male asked: “Where is the sixteenth chapel?”

And does one need to know modern Rome in order to know Rome, to be in Rome?

The experience of gawk?

Along with the Roman Forum, which is really an incomprehensible remnant of what it over the years was, I suppose this is the main “event”, the last place in Rome for me. Reaching and descending from the Dome (in spite of claustrophobia acquired on an impossible-tight window-seat mass-tourist charter flight from Moscow to Cairo…)
Does not my decades-long Bildungsreise in the “Old World” end here? In St. Peter’s. The final necessary place to experience and consider “History” in situ? From Mobile, Tuscaloosa…. through Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, et al.

So a kind of “big day” for me, though only I will know it, and the one person who seems to be reading these notes dropped along my way.

And to make my final point:

After all one’s Bildung, what, perhaps near the end, inner stance does one have? towards one’s own life, Life, and World?