The Vietri Project by Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

Author:Nicola DeRobertis-Theye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Most of the painter’s works, I learned from outdated tourist websites, were in a small museum in Aliano, or at the university in Turin with his archives. A handful were in Liguria, near his family’s home there, but a dozen or so were in Rome, as Anna had mentioned, and after our dinner I felt the need to see them as soon as I could. Vietri had been less in my thoughts since I’d started learning about the painter, his story had eclipsed the others in my mind, and I needed it come full circle, to see if it would merge with Vietri’s. When I brought up the museum’s website to check the hours of admission, I saw that the villa, located off the flank of the Sapienza, was the one in which the self-called duce had lived during his years in Rome. The small collection of twentieth-century art was an afterthought, it seemed most visitors went to tour his bomb shelter. I found these coincidences of Italian history completely ridiculous. There was no room in Italy, everything had happened in the same places, so the painter’s work hung in the home of the very fascist leader whose regime had arrested and exiled him, a home built, I read, on top of thirteen thousand square meters of Jewish catacombs, occupied by the very person who would murder his country’s Jews. What was one to do with all of this? Nothing could ever be only one thing in Rome, everything had already been touched by so many wars, traumas, millennia, the city was greedy for history, what other city laid claim simultaneously to two separate myths of its own foundation? I’d been reading a book on ancient Rome from Loredana’s husband’s collection, it had already been two thousand years since Juvenal lamented how a crowded settlement had been allowed to be built on the site of a holy spring where a water spirit had once seduced the second king of Rome. It was as if the Confederacy had surrendered on the same rock where Manhattan had been purchased for beads and silver spoons, if Andy Warhol’s factory had discovered Incan mummies interred in the building’s foundations, it would never happen, in America we had too much space, and we had the bliss of leaving our physical spaces free of their histories, only in the last four hundred of ten thousand years of occupation of the continent had this level of minutia been recorded for the subsequent generations. It was no wonder the members of my family felt no true sense of individuality outside of the group, and I shuddered, imagining the sticky ties that were already trying to pull me in, and down, away from my pure and unentangled self. Nothing was ever able to stand for just itself in Rome.

I decided to ask Loredana if she’d like to accompany me to see the paintings, I had a desire to see her outside of the apartment, I wanted to shake her out of her calcified grief.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.