Italian Days by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Author:Barbara Grizzuti Harrison [Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802190291
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

If I were driving back from the historical center to Trastevere, I should already have passed the Palazzo Venezia, its balcony. It is strange, I think, how little power that balcony, upon which Mussolini stood and blustered vile nonsense, has to horrify.

His office, on the second floor, was huge and unfurnished except for a desk and three chairs and an ancient map of the world. From the door to Mussolini's desk was a distance of twenty yards, and Mussolini never greeted visitors at the door. Most visitors—including the women to whom he “made love”—were required to stand in his presence. A small door next to a monumental fireplace led to his private apartment; of its furnishings there is no record; presumably there was a bed. What an unpleasant man he was, and not even complicated enough to sustain conjecture.

He kept a light on till all hours. He liked it to be said of him that he worked hard, which he did. When he became acutely lonely, as he deserved to be, he went out on his narrow balcony and surveyed the life of the city, supervised excavations, and forgot, no doubt, that he would someday die. . . .

My cab swings by the Theater of Marcellus. Begun by Caesar and completed by Augustus, it presents an inscrutable face to the world; broken and surrounded by broken marble columns in a field of poppies, it is an apartment building, having never ceased to be in and of use, as theater, fort, palazzo, marketplace, and, most nobly, refuge for the Jews from German occupiers. In one of the apartments there is a hanging garden. These are magic, sunny thoughts. . . .

I am past the theater now, I am in the Piazza della Bocca della Verità; sun slants off the Tiber; here is an open space where fountains calm and oleanders perfume the air, the cypress and the pines and the buildings—ancient, medieval, and Baroque—revitalize the word picturesque. . . . And here is the pretty Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, its elegant bell tower, its porch with the Bocca della Verità—the marble face with holes for eyes, an unkind slit of a mouth. If you have a lie on your conscience, do not put your hand in its mouth; it will chew it off (it probably came from a sewer, a manhole). And here is the Temple of Vesta, so called for its dear circular shape, on a slope of green, on the left bank of the Tiber; and here the Temple of Manly Fortune, foursquare and manly indeed . . . though it was probably a temple to Matuta, the goddess of dawn. This part of Rome was made for dawn and dusk; it receives light like a dream of light.

Now I am crossing the Tiber, and here is the boat-shaped Tiber Island, and soon I am at the Porta Portese, cars battling through a double-arched gate, and from this large and noisy space, before the spell of peace

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