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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?

Again — if more strongly in the touristless churches — the abrupt disjunction between the life outside the church and the solemn silence inside. If more solitarily after Luther, more deeply uncertain “after Nietzsche”, the deepest questions of Mankind and Meaning are present(ef) in the elaborated embodied Meaning of Catholic Belief — in these structures of enmeaninged, “elevated” matter via art. Most surely are not clear on the contrasts and experience. Probably even of the deep disjunction. Some seem to experience the life of the streets, of the world outside, as mean passage to the inner sanctuary embodied eor instance where I now sit — Church of the Holy Trinity* of Pellegrini. Others surely come by custom and hope; some with deep need. Others enter curious, like in an unfamiliar museum of Meaning: a serious solemn… but (e)strange(d?) Meaning. From eg Luther to Nietzsche (also but more lightly in eg Emerson) not the Fall of Adam and Eve but the Fall of Meaning… Should most “Thank** God” they don’t notice, know this, think** this?

*If any aspect of theology calls up problems in those who don’t unquestioningly believe, “The Trinity” is one the serious problematic elements of doctrine, of belief.

** “thank you” comes from “think you”.

And if there is no Patertheos? What meaning has the man on the cross? And if this great Meaning of (Hi)Story has become unbelievable or irrelevant to Life and World. Wherein and whenin Life and World, but not god, are capitalizable for Meaning? From Moses to Camus, et al?

This all mostly off the tourist guides narrations, and most worldly Grand Tourists as well. I come with deeper needs and troubles, from loss of naive belief… A plane crash entailing theodicy… A 60’s “pagan pluralistic revival” destroying accepted, inherited belief…

When, after trying the door to the toilet, the person also knocked on the door, I predicted that s/he would be waiting in the soace with the sink inarguably for maximum one person. He was, and he had a backpack on as well. He had to squeeze in by me. Is it too much to expect that he be conscious of how that would occur?

If one is not much worried about sin, why be a Christian? As I walk the Corso from Casa di Goethe in Rome it occurs to me that Goethe certainly wasn’t.

It seems that Friedrich Nietzsche came to Rome no reason unbeliever, but as a active disbeliever. I allow myself to believe I am deeper than that. But then, I have been to Mount Sinai, and stayed a month on the Mount of Olives, so perhaps I have different problems — and questions– from Nietzsche, or Goethe or Emerson here in Rome.

What I can only imagine considers his self to especially be a man, walked by smoking, a cigar, a woman at his side. I can’t imagine kissing such a mouth and breath!

The photos I took inside Saint Peter’s basilica are so good they are like acts.

This is the kind of “philosophy” which almost drove me away from it permanently in 1971 when I experienced its kin by a dreadfully boring lecturer at the University of Alabama. “Philosophy” as logical positivism. Meanwhile, I made my way decades later to the legendary cave of Pythagoras on Samos.

And even if Pythagoras and his cave are fully mythical, I prefer that to the hard fact desiccating dearth of person and mind of that lecturer in Tuscaloosa in ’71.

*http://steppenwolfmoscow1.blogspot.com/2013/12/modern-misosophy.html

In the greater world today wherein lies any “power” in Rome? Obviously in the Papacy. Obviously not in any passing Italian government. Otherwise, it seems to lie in the mystique of Rome in history.

The main political problem in the USA is not the “political system”– it is the political citizens.

How many grand tourists were changed by their Italian journies, and how many returned the same, save for momentos? Bildung. Misbildung. Unbildung.

I People with thoughts and insights

What was it they painted that we needed, and want, and why. An assuagement of death?

Most Romans do not live in “Rome”

Periods of escaping our time. Our world.

Praeparatio Evangelica Praeparatio EvangelicaAnd if there is no God for you, CBS is preparation of for the event

I was able to spend about 20 minutes alone in the Roman Rorum

The thought comes to me this late afternoon that this is one of the last historic cities I need(ed) see.

I just cannot except it. The mere fact of physically being a Rome is adequate to some real meaning of “being in wrong” no I’m not going back there.

In my youth, most looked (more at than in)to the Bible to make sense of themselves, their lives and our world (sub specie biblia, if not dei) but in fact, most of human history, especially that area into which each one has been born and raised, is a kind of mirror of human life, collectively and individually. As I long ago coined: Anthropography.

http://steppenwolfmoscow1.blogspot.com/2012/03/anthrography.html

Frashokereti

Matthew 13:50

The Colosseum in Rome as a philosophic mirror of and in human history of men, women.

Most here live inside their received American identity… rather it lives in them. And they are thereby and therefore not partakers and participants of the nonetheless ongoing greater human (Hi)story.

Thus they “are” like permanent understudies. And it seems to me mostly so unawares.