Written over the course of a year spent in Rome as a Fellow of the Swiss Institute in Rome, Istituto Svizzero di Roma (ISR) in 1999-2000, Letters from Rome is a series of short literary pieces.

Three unpublished extracts:

Letters From Rome:
Liber Alter

Otium is a poem

Roma is a quartet of letters

A simple epitaph on a marble slab

Roma, 1st November 2000

Otium is a poem that I have not written my dear Gadda. And as I sit in the elusive November sun with the slim volume of interviews that Adelphi published some twenty years after your death, I wonder if it is not your poem. Each life, after all, is much like a poem left unwritten: a series of verses that remain in the recesses — in the fabrik — of one's being.

            They have called your responses to more or less intelligent questions Per favore, mi lasci nell'ombra; please leave me in the shadow, or was your response, please let me be in the shadow, I am not sure which is the better English rendition.

            Otium: that Latin concept-word, means so much more than mere un-occupied or spare time, so much more than the freedom of leisure or a state of inactivity. In Roman times, where so much energy is spent in the pursuit of being active in the public eye, otium is sought for respite; temporary relief from pain; time to gather one's thoughts; to forget the intrigues of social life and distil from one's torments the pristine; to re-create the magic that has no purpose or function beyond its being: to confer with one's self.

            Our beloved Tacitus quotes Seneca's request to Nero when he feared that he had fallen out of favour with the emperor, asking to be left to his own devices. With typical irony, Tacitus notes in his Annals, how Seneca invoked the example of Maecenas whom he so often disparaged in his letters. It is with the subtlest irony that Tacitus writes how Seneca recalls that Augustus Maecenati urbe in ipsa uelut peregrinum otium permisit (book XIV, liii.) For you, however, my dear Gadda, there was no Augustus to permit you to live otium as a stranger in the city.

            You appear timorous and ever apologetic in your responses to incessant questions. Questions that aim to bring into public view that which can only be considered in the privacy of the inner self. You murmur with hesitation, in the last interview before your death, that perhaps La Cognizione del Dolore is your most important book. William Weaver translated this title as Acquainted With Grief. How can one write of the pain with the ink of satire, as you do, without withdrawing from the tumult of social intercourse, without seeking the cognition of the silencing shadow that might reveal the poem that is otium?

is a quartet of letters, an alternating of consonant and vowel, within which is concealed the sacred syllable. The ancient city is said to have been named Valentia, the strong, founded by Ulysses or Latinus, one of his sons by Circe. Later the name was transposed into the Greek word for strength, Rhoma. Another tradition has it that Rhoma was the name of one of the women that journeyed with Aeneas, tired of peregrinating, she burnt their ships in the estuary of the Tiber, so that they might settle once and for all.

       Among others, Angerona, goddess of silence and suffering, is said to know the secret name of Rome, she is depicted with her finger poised before her bandaged mouth; instilling silence:— that none might pronounce the true name of the city, and thereby invite the gods that dwell therein to abandon it. A practice, according to Macrobius (Saturnalia III, 9, 1), that the Romans used when they laid siege to a city. But the same Macrobius doubts that it is Angerona, and upholds Ops, also named Ope Consiva, as a more likely candidate for the keeping of Rome's secret name.

       Ops, like Valentia and Rhoma, means strength, substance, and support. Very little is known about this ancient Sabine goddess, other than she is the goddess of abundance, resourcefulness, and prosperity. She is a harvest goddess whose feasts, the Opiconsivia and the Opalia fall respectively on the 25^th August and the 19^th December. In the reign of Augustus, a twin altar was raised in honour of Ceres Mater and Ops Augusta, the latter’s feast-day, according to the stone calendar found at Amiternum, was on the 10^th August.

Arthur Hugh Clough, in his Amours de Voyage, wrote;

  Rome, believe me, my friend, is like its own Monte Testaccio,
  Merely a marvellous mass of broken and castaway wine-pots.

18 November 2000

A simple epitaph on a marble slab:

HIC

IACET

PVLVIS

CINIS

ET

NIHIL

without mention of name or date, this in the church of the Convento dei Cappuccini at the beginning of Via Veneto. The slab lies in the central nave before the altar. You will remember our visit to the convent; it was last winter. Keen to vaunt his simplicity, the kindly abbot, who blasphemed more than once, was our guide. Only now have I searched deeper for the man who decreed the humble epitaph. As the abbot mentioned, it was Antonio Barberini, youngest brother of Pope Urbano VIII.

            The biographical dictionary of Italians states that he was born in Florence on the 18th November 1569, baptized Marcello, your favourite. He took the name of his father on the latter's death in 1571. After briefly working in the mercantile business of the family, in 1592, a mere 23 year-old, he entered the order of the Capuccini, Italy's beloved Franciscan friars. When his brother Maffeo was elected pontiff in 1623, Marcello was a guardian in the Franciscan convent of San Gemignano in Florence. Urbano VIII ordered the transfer of his brother to Rome. Reluctantly Marcello obeyed. He came to Rome on foot, who knows if this pilgrimage was a sign of true faith or a message of resigned piety? 

            Charged with various functions as Cardinal and Bishop, he took a passive role in the power-games of the church, concentrating on protecting and establishing convents. It was under his instigation that the convent and church in which he is buried was established, or transferred rather, from the site near the fontana di Trevi, so you see my darling, he must have been a true Marcello! (in his day, however, the fountain, into which we have cast so many coins, was a simple basin, restored, with funds from a wine-tax, by Marcello’s pontifical brother; its cool waters, as today, were those of the Acqua Vergine brought to Rome by Agrippa’s aqueduct in 19 B.C., but I doubt that this Marcello would ever have followed some brava-la-bionda nymph into its waters.)

            Upon the death of Urbano VIII in 1644, he was not involved in the crisis that the end of every pontificate entails. It seems that somehow Marcello managed to stay out of political turmoil. Not an easy feat. The only thing he seemed to have strived for was to maintain the spirit of the Franciscan reforms. He died on the 10^th December 1646, an old man of 77. His testament included a legacy of 25,000 scudi for the church of Propaganda Fide, and, in a supplement to the testament, dated 25^th August in the year of his death, a fund of 500 scudi for the publication of one of Fra Girolamo Savonarola's titles.

            How and when he dictated the simple words for his epitaph, I do not know, and it does not really matter. Nor is it truly necessary to know that one Antonio or Marcello Barberini lies there, although it is poetic beauty to think that a man from such a power-monger family should choose the anonymity of:

HERE

LIES

DUST

ASH

AND

NAUGHT