Cemetery wanderings - a great trek through Cimitero Verano in Rome

We should've known from the size of the huge green oval on Rome maps that the main Rome cemetery, Cimitero Verano, was much, much larger than it first appears.  We had visited it many years ago and appreciated its almost Rococo excesses in funerary monuments as well as notables buried there. Like much else in Rome, it was (and is) in a state of disrepair.

Also, like much else in Rome, burials in this location--along the via Tiburtina consular road and adjacent to the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le mura ("San Lorenzo outside the walls")--have been going on for over 2,000 years.  

Virginio Vespignani's "Meditation," at the entrance
to Rome's Verano Cemetery. Note the skull under
her foot.  She is meditating on death. About 1880.

The current cemetery is basically attributable to Napoleon, who wanted to displace the Church. During his 1805-14 reign, he established the rule that burials must be outside Rome's walls (and not within church yards) and brought in Rome's notable architect, Giuseppe Valadier, to design Verano. Although the Popes took over again after Napoleon, the cemetery was expanded just after the establishment of the secular Italy monarchy in 1870.  As a result the basic design of the cemetery is not particularly religious.  The imposing entrance is dominated by four huge statues of  Meditation, Hope, Charity and Silence, rather than statues to saints.

The monument to Goffredo Mameli, who, on July 6, 1849 [here in Roman numerals]
 died at 22 of wounds in the campaign to free Italy from the Popes (the Risorgimento).
Mameli also wrote the lyrics for what is now the Italian national anthem "Il Canto degli Italiani,"
also known as Inno di Mameli (Mameli's Hymn). The monument has the Rome she-wolf
and the twins Romulus and Remus at the top. It has fasci on the sides, indicating
it might have been erected in the Fascist era. The quote on the back is from
Mameli's friend and Risorgimento giant, Giuseppe Mazzini.

Once through the entrance, and once through the older part of the cemetery, enormous newer areas open up, often in mid-20th-century architectural styles. One reason for the newer parts of the cemetery as well is the extensive bombing by the Allies of the church, the cemetery and the areas around it in World War II. 

The cemetery also is rightly famous for the famous people buried there, from actors to politicians. We found particularly interesting the monument to Goffredo Mameli in the older part.

Actor Alberto Sordi's mausoleum is one,
if not the only one, with an alarm system.
Apparently Sordi was known for wanting
to make sure no one took his "stuff,"
even in death.

The mausoleums of beloved comedic actor Alberto Sordi and Mussolini Mistress Clara Petacci are in the newer part. 

The cemetery also was divided into Catholic and Jewish sections, with an additional World War I section.  Today the burials are not so divided.  There is also a powerful memorial to those who died in the German concentration camps.

But Sordi couldn't prevent a bit of
fan graffiti.

More on those monuments and other parts of the cemetery in the captions of the photos below. There are also lists of notable people buried in the cemetery on both English and Italian sites.
And the "Find a Grave" site has Verano listed with many "Famous Memorials." such as philosopher George Santayana (who famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it") and author Alberto Moravia, about whom we've written.

After I wrote this post but before it was published, Cynthia Coco Camille Korzekwa posted in RST's Facebook site on work she had done and an excellent Web site (in English), with descriptions of art work in the cemetery.

One of the 20th century mausoleums and our guide,
Diego, with "lo zainetto rosso," his little red
backpack.

We owe our great trek through the newer parts of the cemetery to the guide, "Lo zainetto rosso" ("the little red backpack), aka Diego Cruciani.  Diego has an unusual sensibility and is incredibly knowledgeable.  He guides in two languages at once, basically--Italian and English. You can see his latest plans on his Facebook page. And you can join his email list (diego1cruciani@gmail.com). You just show up - no prior reservations. And he accepts very modest donations at the end (I think - after asking our other fellow followers - we contributed 5 Euros each after 2.5 hours of a tour with about 10 people).

The cemetery's Web site in English: http://www.cimitericapitolini.it/english-version/list-of-cemeteries/79-the-verano-monumental-cemetery.html.  The site also lists all the trams and buses that go to the cemetery (and San Lorenzo fuori le mura), and the hours it's open.

More photos and history below.  Dianne

And for another capital city and its history through the cemetery, see Abby A. Johnson and Ronald M. Johnson's "In the Shadow of the United States Capitol: Congressional Cemetery and the Memory of the Nation."

"In memory of the 2,728 Roman citizens eliminated in the Nazi extermination camps, 1943-1945."

Diego explains this monument to Attilio Ferraris, which calls him "Champion of the world,"
and has a bas-relief of a fallen soccer player.  Ferraris was part of Italy's 1934 World
Championship team and died at 43, in 1947,  while playing an old-timers game.

The mausoleum of  Clara Petacci, Mussolini's mistress
 who was executed with him by partisans near Lake Como in 1945.
The monument was at one time in shambles, but somebody obviously
 paid to restore it. The people in our tour group who approached
the mausoleum (several declined) are reading a recent
hand-written note to Clara.

.

A children's section.

An elaborate monument to architect Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo. He was notably active in Rome in the 1930s, including working on what was to be the Fascist Party Headquarters (now "La Farnesina," the State Department) and the
Fascist Piazza Augusto Imperatore, where Mussolini wanted to be buried (in Emperor Augustus's tomb). That didn't work out, but the piazza still carries its rationalist design and is in RST's Top 40. Interestingly Morpurgo was Jewish. One biographical note says simply "He was not much affected by the race laws." And he added his mother's name to his last name (Ballio) after World War II and managed to continue his profession, as did many architect's associated with the Fascist regime. He died in 1966.

A small part of a lovely grotto-like section, composed mainly of "in
memento mori" - memorials rather than tombs.

I can't find out anything more about this Guglielmotti
family.  We rather liked the mausoleum, and the sculpture--
which looks like it's from the 1970s.

The Pope and Mussolini: What - and Who - did the Church Sacrifice for Fascism?

A commemorative card of the Lateran Accords, with the ineffectual King Vittorio Emanuele III at left (his Savoy house symbol above), Mussolini center, note, with his fasce symbol above, and Pope Pius XI right, with the papal symbol - papal hat and crossed keys, above right.

Where was the Catholic Church during Mussolini's rise to power?  Did it play a role in the increasing totalitarianism of the regime, the persecution of the Jews in Italy, or the invasions of other countries that marked the Fascist regime?  Those are difficult questions, and they fit with the near total confusion most of us have about Italy's role in World War II.  The Pope and Mussolini, David Kertzer's latest book, goes a long way towards providing some answers.

Kertzer is one of the best historians of the relationship between the Catholic Church and the secular side of Italy.  Along with his knowledge of the 19th and 20th centuries in Italy, he brings to this book knowledge of the vast Church archives that were opened only within the past 10 years, as well as the detailed records of the Fascist police, who had spies in the Vatican recording every move. Thus Kertzer, as his subtitle asserts, can tell us "The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe."

Most of this story takes place in Rome, the seat of both the Pope's and Mussolini's power.  It starts with the Pope locked in the Vatican, where the Popes had been in self-imposed exile since the secular forces took over the city, and formed the state, in 1870.  As Kertzer describes it, "Although the Church no longer ran the city, Rome still seemed to have a church on every block."

The Papal rooms in the Vatican where Mussolini's
negotiators met with Pope Pius XI's representatives.

The two men - Pope Pius XI and Mussolini - came to power in 1922, the year Pius XI was elected Pope and Mussolini orchestrated the Fascist March on Rome.  They shared important values, according to Kertzer. "Neither had any sympathy for parliamentary democracy.  Neither believed in freedom of speech or freedom of association.  Both saw Communism as a grave threat.  Both thought Italy was mired in crisis and that the current political system was beyond salvation." (One might think of Donald Trump in a similar vein.)

The Chigi Palace, seat of Mussolini's government.  One of
Mussolini's "gifts" to the Pope, to try to make him more
manageable, was the Chigi library.  The Pope started life
as a librarian.

Mussolini was not instantly easy to appreciate, and his movement was violent.  To gain approval, Kertzer argues, the Fascists needed the Vatican to play a major role in legitimizing the new regime.  Mussolini had at one time been a "mangiaprete" or priest-eater, and his wife, Rachele (as distinguished from his various mistresses, including the Jewish intellectual Margherita Sarfatti), remained staunchly anti-clerical.

Kertzer discovered from his work in the archives not how the Pope and Mussolini were different, but all they had in common  Besides their common values, listed above:  "Both had explosive tempers.  Each bristled at the charge of being the patsy of the other.  Both demanded unquestioned obedience from their subordinates...Each came to be disillusioned by the other, yet dreaded what would happen if their alliance were to end."

Piazza della Pigna in central Rome, where Mussolini met with
Cardinal Pietro Gaspari as part of the negotiations that led to the
Lateran Accords.   Mussolini entered the home of  Count
Carlo Santucci from this piazza.  The Cardinal entered from the
other side.  The home had the advantage of entrances on two
different piazzas - so the meeting could be kept secret.

The mutually supportive relationship between the two men led to the Lateran Accords of 1929, signed on February 9.  The Accords gave the Vatican specific territories in Rome (but not the Pamphili gardens it also wanted); Catholicism as the state religion - allowing crucifixes back in school classrooms; recognition of religious marriages for the first time since 1870; and a lot of money.
In return, the Pope supported Fascism.  One must recall at this time, many in the US did as well.  Cardinal Spellman wrote, "These are wonderful days to be alive and still more wonderful to be alive in Rome," adding that the Pope and Mussolini would find their places in history.  And President Franklin D. Roosevelt initially was positively inclined towards Mussolini.

As the Accords were being negotiated, the Pope saw Mussolini as the "man sent by providence," one who basically was releasing the Church from its exclusion from Italian life.

From February 9, 1929 onward the Pope and Mussolini continued an awkward dance, as the Pope continually tried to have the Lateran Accords firmly enforced - especially with respect to maintaining the Catholic Action social groups - and Mussolini tried to move away from them.  My conclusion, after reading Kertzer's book, is that Mussolini outfoxed the Pope.  By threatening to take away aspects of Catholicism's power in the state institutions, the Duce led the Pope to prop him up after opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti was killed by Fascist thugs (1924) [and Mussolini thought, because of the reaction to that murder, that his regime was doomed]; successfully kept the Pope silent when Italy invaded Ethiopia (1935); and managed to convince the Pope to keep his mouth shut when the racial laws (1938) went into effect.

The lodgings for the Jesuits, next to the Church of the Gesu' in
 central Rome.  The head of the Jesuits, the Polish Wlodimir
 Ledochowski, was among the most fanatical anti-Semites
 advising Pope Pius XI.  Ledochowski, according to Kertzer, 
thwarted some of Pius XI's attempts to counter the Fascist 
racial laws.

It's clear, according to Kertzer, that this Pope was uncomfortable with all of these actions by Italy and Mussolini.  At the same time, he could not imagine the Church having as great a role in the Italian state as it had with Mussolini in power.  Pius XI even allowed the Catholic political party, the Popular Party, to be disbanded; its founder, the Sicilian priest Don Luigi Sturzo, was sent into exile in London for more than 20 years.

Pius XI was especially troubled with the racial laws, in part because he did not believe in biologically separate races, but perhaps most because he wanted Jews who had converted to Catholicism not to be treated as Jews.  Yet the Pope was surrounded by others in the Vatican who were more conservative than he, and some of whom were virulently anti-Semitic (see the reference to the Jesuit leader in the photo caption at right).  Pius XI came to despise Hitler.  He closed the Vatican museums and left Rome when Hitler made his famous 1938 visit to Rome.

"The Vatican," Kertzer demonstrates, "made a secret deal with Mussolini to refrain from any criticism of Italy's infamous anti-Semitic 'racial laws' in exchange for better treatment of Catholic organizations.  This fact is largely unknown in Italy, and despite all the evidence presented in this book, I have no doubt many will deny it."

After more than 15 years of the pas de deux with Mussolini, the Pope was ready to be somewhat more outspoken, going so far as to prepare a speech that was seen at the time as highly critical of Fascism.

But Mussolini not only outfoxed the Pope, he also outlived him.  Pius XI died February 10, 1939, and the very pro-German Eugenio Pacelli, taking the name Pius XII, succeeded him.  That speech Pius XI haf prepared was never given, and even its full text  - hardly the heavy criticism some thought at the time - was repressed until recently.

Photos were not permitted, but this painting illustrates the visit.  Mussolini went to the Vatican only once, and hated going there.  His pact with Pius XI was purely practical.  He appeared to remain a "mangiaprete," or "priest-eater."

Two very good reviews of Kertzer's book when it first appeared in 2014 are by Alexander Stile in The New York Review of Books (interestingly titled, "The Pope Who Tried"), and Steve Donoghue in The National.

Dianne

Freud in Rome (I): All Roads Lead to Rome--but not for Freud

RST has always taken an interest in how people experience Rome, whether famous writers such as John Cheever and Ralph Ellison or today's tourists.  It's not an easy city to visit, to understand, or to make one's own.  And no one had more trouble with Rome than the eminent psychologist Sigmund Freud.  This two-part post looks at Freud's complex relationship to the Eternal City.  

It's not hard to imagine Sigmund Freud as the consummate egghead/intellectual, toiling away year after year in his Viennese study, reading and writing, analyzing patients.  That's all true. But Freud's self-image was strikingly different.  "One would hardly know to look at me," he wrote in an early letter to his fiancée, but already in school I was always a bold man of the opposition, was always where one could avow an extreme and, as a rule, had to atone for it."  A close friend and colleague once told him, Freud wrote, that "he had found out that there was hidden in me, beneath the cover of shyness, an immoderately bold and fearless person.  I have always believed this, and simply never dared to tell anyone."  

Freud

Bold and fearless?  In some ways, yes.  After all, he had invented a new and controversial discipline, psychoanalysis, and spent much of his life laboring to convince unbelievers of its truth and value.  He had done so, moreover, as a Jew.  It was a troubled identity to carry in the era of the Dreyfus Affair, and he had carried it forthrightly and proudly.  At age 80, he confirmed a life of defiance in a note to a colleague:  "I have always held faithfully to our people, and never pretended to be anything but what I am: A Jew from Moravia whose parents come from Austrian Galicia."  Even the Nazis didn't scare him--though he was naïve in the matter;  in 1937, when a French analyst suggested he leave Vienna, Freud was cavalier: "The Nazis?  I'm not afraid of them.  Help me rather to combat my true enemy." (More below on the "true enemy".)

Bold, fearless, courageous.  Yet there was one thing, one place really, that Freud feared: Rome.  On its face the fear seems absurd, and it takes on additional resonance when considered in the context of Freud's hobbies (the word doesn't do justice) and interests.

Lake Trasimeno

Psychology, of course, absorbed the great
share of his time and energies, but beyond his life work he was not without other pursuits. As a youth, Freud studied Latin and Greek and read extensively in the literature of antiquity, reveling in the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece, and, yes, Rome.  Over a lifetime he accumulated a substantial collection of objects from antiquity, statuettes and fragments, that he kept in his office and on his desk.  He had, he wrote the novelist Stefan Zweig late in life, made many sacrifices in assembling his collection, adding, with more than a little exaggeration, that he had "actually...read more archaeology than psychology."

It is all the more remarkable, then, that he did not set foot in Rome until 1901, when he was 45 years old.  He got to Italy before then, more than once--Vienna was not that far away, after all, and he loved Italy--but none of the itineraries took him to Rome. He toured Venice, Pisa, Livorno, Siena, Rapallo, Gorizia, Florence, Verona, Ravenna, and other cities--he even made plans to visit Naples while bypassing Rome--and at one point reached Lake Trasimeno, only 50 miles from Rome, only to turn back.  During all this he regularly fantasized about meeting his dear friend and correspondent Wilhelm Fliess in Rome--at Easter, for a conference, on a trip together.  In 1898 he revealed to Fliess that he was studying the typography of Rome, adding that "the yearning [for Rome] becomes ever more tormenting."

He even dreamed about Rome (convenient, as he had begun to write a book about dreams). Indeed, when the "dream book" was published in 1900 and 1901 as The Interpretation of Dreams, it contained accounts of five Freud dreams, all "based on a longing to visit Rome."  In one, he was looking out the window of a train at the Tiber and Ponte Sant'Angelo, only to have the train pull away before he could set foot on Roman soil.  In another, he actually got to Rome but was "disappointed to find that the scenery was far from being of an urban character."  In still another, also set in Rome, he discovered that Rome was full of German posters, a sign, he thought, that it might be uncomfortable to be a German speaker in Rome.

Freud was very much self-aware: "Since I have been studying the unconscious," he wrote

Freud (l) and Fliess (r)

Fliess rather smugly in 1897, "I have become so interesting to myself."  And he knew that his anxieties about Rome were excessive.  "My longing for Rome is, by the way [love that "by the way" ed.], deeply neurotic."

What was going on?  Why was Freud so fearful of entering Rome?  One avenue to answering that question lies in the full story, as interpreted by Freud, of that bizarre turnaround at Lake Trasimeno, with Rome just hours away.  As Freud knew well, the lake was the scene of a great battle in the Punic Wars, in which Hannibal's troops annihilated a substantial segment of the Roman army.  Then, and later, it seemed as if Hannibal would enter and take Rome, but--like the younger Freud--he did not.  "I had actually been following in Hannibal's footsteps," Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams.  "Like him, I had been fated not to see Rome; and he too had moved into the Campagna when everyone had expected him in Rome."  But there was more to Freud's interpretation than a simple comparison.  As Freud revealed, more than once, Hannibal had been a boyhood hero of the analyst--and he remained a hero in eyes of the older man--for three reasons.

First, Hannibal was a Semite, not quite the same as a Jew, but a status that linked him in

Freud's eyes with the ancient Hebrews and, through them, with modern Jewry--and we have seen how important this identification was for Freud.  Becoming conscious as a youth of "what it meant to belong to an alien race," "the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem."

Second, the Catholic connection.  Of course, there were no Catholics, and no Catholic Church, when Hannibal defeated the Romans in 217 BC.  But for Freud's "youthful mind," Rome was synonymous with the Catholic Church.  Hence "Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church."  For Freud the man, the Catholic Church remained the enemy.  When Freud dismissed the Nazi threat and sought help with "my true enemy," he was referring to the Catholic Church.

The third reason for Hannibal's importance, and for Freud's reluctance to visit Rome, also involves religion, but it also involves Freud's father.  As a youth of 10 or 12, as Freud tells the story, his father had told him of an event that had occurred when he--his father--was a young man.  While walking on the street with a new fur cap, a "Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: Jew! get off the pavement."  When the younger Freud asked his father what he had done, his father had replied:  "I went into the roadway and picked up my cap."  It was a traumatic moment for the boy.  "This struck me," Freud wrote, "as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy [Sigmund] by the hand.  I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans.  Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my fantasies."

It seems clear then, that Freud identified powerfully with Hannibal.  To deepen and fulfill that identification, Freud could appreciate Hannibal's victory but was also obliged, for a time at least, to replicate and share the general's failure to breach and conquer Rome.

In the next installment: what Freud found in Rome, and some thoughts about his fraught relationship to the Eternal City.

Bill

The Complete Letters of Sigmund Feud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), contains numerous references to Freud's Rome fears.  The Interpretation of Dreams, parts  I and II (volumes IV and V in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmumd Freud, James Strachey, ed. and translator, 1900, 1901 (London: the Hogarth Press, 1953, 1954) are very valuable.  Also important are Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988); Letters of Sigmund Freud, selected and edited by Ernst L. Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960); Peter M. Newton, Freud: from Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995); Ellen Oliensis, Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jonathan Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), a fascinating, readable book that got me started on this topic.

A Cynic Abroad: Mark Twain in Rome

Twain, 1871, photo by Mathew Brady

In 1867, Mark Twain toured Europe and the Holy Land.  His usually acerbic comments were published two years later in The Innocents Abroad--to this day his best-selling book.  Rome was on the itinerary, but by the time he reached the Eternal City he had seen other Italian cities, including Genoa, whose palaces he found rather stolid and ordinary, making "no pretensions to architectural magnificence," and where he discovered that Italian "vagabonds" were sure to pounce with glee on his cigar butts. There as elsewhere, he found too many churches and too many "well-fed priests."  "These worthies suffer in the flesh and do penance all their lives, I suppose, but they look like consummate famine-breeders.  They are all fat and serene."

The itinerary

Genoa

Perhaps with some justification, he was suspicious of the relics he found in every church.  "As for the
bones of St. Denis," he wrote, "I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary."  While acknowledging Genoa's historic greatness, it was to Twain a thing of the past, having "degenerated into an unostentatious commerce in velvets and silver-filigree work."

Milan fared better, or at least its enormous cathedral did.  "Surely," wrote Twain with nary a jot of irony, "it must be the princeliest creation that ever brain of man conceived."  Da Vinci's "Last Supper," on the other hand, was a "mournful wreck," "stained and discolored," something akin to a

Da Vinci's Last Supper. Were the disciples Hebrews, or Italians?

"decayed, blind, toothless, pock-marked Cleopatra," indeed, so awful that for Twain any of the 12 copies being made while he visited was superior to the original.  So damaged that "the spectator cannot really tell, now, whether the disciples are Hebrews or Italians."  "After reading so much about it," Twain concluded, "I am satisfied that the Last Supper was a miracle of art once.  But it was 300 years ago." 

Lake Como?  Disappointingly small and narrow, and its waters "dull" in comparison "with the wonderful transparence of Lake Tahoe," where, Twain claimed, "one can count the scales on a trout at a depth of a hundred and eighty feet," and whose reputation suffers only because of an unfelicitous name: Tahoe means "grasshopper soup."

Italy's interior?  Populated by peasants and their children, "idle, as a general thing" and the "home of priest craft--of a happy, cheerful, contented ignorance, superstition, degradation,  poverty, indolence, and everlasting unaspiring worthlessness."

Tintoretto, Finding the Body of
St. Mark

Venice?  A shadow of its former self, "her piers [are] deserted, her warehouses are empty, her armies and her navies are but memories.  Her glory is departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world....a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for school-girls and children."  It was in Venice, too, that Twain began to experience something like tourist burnout.  "We have seen famous pictures until our eyes are weary with looking at them and refuse to find interest in them any longer.  And what wonder, when here are twelve hundred pictures by Palma the Younger in Venice and fifteen hundred by Tintoretto?"  The same, he thought, could be said of all-too-frequent depictions of martyrs:  "...it seemed to me that when I had seen one of these martyrs I had seen them all."

Florence?  The required visit to the Pitti Palace and the Ufizzi, where "we tried indolently to recollect something about the Guelphs and Ghibelines and the other historical cut-throats whose quarrels and assassinations make up so large a share of Florentine history, but the subject was not attractive."  Twain admired the city's mosaics.  Of the Arno, he wrote, "it would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water into it.  They call it a river....They even help out the delusion by building bridges over it."

Civita Vecchia?  "...the finest nest of dirt, vermin and ignorance we have found yet, except that African perdition they call Tangier, which is just like it."  "All this country belongs to the Papal States.  They do not appear to have any schools here, and only one billiard table."  "We are going to Rome.  There is nothing to see here." 

Rome was for Twain an intimidating place that threatened to deny him the joy of discovery,  His introduction to his first experience of the city begins with a long discourse on discovery, "the noblest delight."  "To be the first," he adds, "that is the idea."  And therein lay the problem.  "What is there in Rome," Twain lamented, "for me to see that others have not seen before?  What is there for me to touch that others have not touched?  What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others?  What can I discover?--Nothing.  Nothing whatsoever.  One charm of travel dies here."

There's hope in that last sentence--"One charm of travel dies here," for it implies some knowledge of travel's other charms, as if Twain might slough off his despair and dig into Rome's other charms.  No.  So invested is he in the city's denial of discovery that he immediately reverses the field and imagines himself a modern inhabitant of the Roman Campagna--slothful, superstitious, ignorant--traveling to wondrous America to experience the joys of discovery.  In a passage long enough to make me wonder if the man was sane, Twain describes what his Roman peasant would see, for the first time:  a nation with "no overshadowing Mother Church, and yet the people survive; common country children actually reading books; cities where people drink milk but the streets are not crowded with goats; houses with "real glass windows"; fire engines and fire departments; newspapers, printed by "a great machine...by thousands every hour"; common men who own land not rented from the church or nobles; and Jews "treated just like human beings, instead of dogs." 

St. Peter's.  Just too damn big.  

Emerging from his Rome-induced depression, Twain visits the Vatican, only to experience more disappointment.  St. Peter's is big, yes, but despite its mass it "did not look nearly so large as the [US] capitol, and certainly [was] not a twentieth part as beautiful, from the outside."  Inside, the building was on such a vast scale that "there were no contrasts to judge by--none but the people, and I had not noticed them.  They were insects,"  "lost in the vast spaces."  He tells the story of an army officer, searching for 10,000 troops he knew to be inside the cathedral--and failing to find them.  From the dome, he finds the distant Coliseum, only to describe it as the place where ignorant Romans killed Christians in order to "teach the people to abhor and fear the new doctrine that followers of Christ were teaching."  And this lesson--we're still apparently in the Dome--segues into an indictment of the Inquisition, for Twain an even worse phenomenon, the product not of Roman "barbarians" but of "civilized people."

Later, perhaps in a state of regret, Twain visits the Coliseum.  He's still intimidated; "Every body knows the picture of the Coliseum."  But he's also appreciative of the structure's "reserve," "that royal seclusion which is proper to majesty," in sum a building that "more vividly than all the written histories...tells the story of Rome's grandeur and Rome's decay."  Then, oddly, swept away by his own ruminations on the pomp, pageantry, and drama that once characterized the "theatre of Rome," Twain imagines discovering the only extant playbill for one of those Coliseum productions, then adds the discovery of "a stained and mutilated copy of the Roman Daily Battle-Ax, containing a critique upon this very performance."  Page upon page follow, of what can only be called drivel.  Faced with a city that thwarted his desires for original experience, Twain had found a way to "discover": he invented historical documents, then writes endlessly about them.  He concludes this exercise with self-praise for not using the clichéd phrase "butchered to make a Roman holiday." 

There is more to this section on Rome.  More pages are filled with a rant on Michelangelo: "I did not want Michael Angelo for breakfast--for luncheon--for dinner--for tea--for supper--for between meals.  I like a change, occasionally." "In Rome, especially, Michelangelo is a force, designing St.

One of too many Michelangelos

Peter's, the Pantheon, the Tiber, even the Roman sewer known as the Cloaca Maxima--which of course he did not design."  Funny, perhaps, but also a sign of the novelist's failure to find a way into a real Rome that he could enjoy.  Another rant follows, this one about their Roman tour guide, whom they befuddle and mock by asking him if (for example) the Roman Forum was a work by Michael Angelo.  "This guide," he writes, "must continue to suffer.  If he does not enjoy it, so much the worse for him.  We do."  At the Vatican museums, the same guide is again victimized, this time by an exaggerated boredom: "we never showed any interest in any thing." 


There's some serious relief from the well-intentioned but failed, and revealing, humor.  A visit to the catacombs of St. Callixtus, under the Church of St. Sebastian, finds Twain attentive and moderately involved, if again overwhelmed at the scope of the phenomenon: 160 catacombs under Rome, he observes, and 7 million graves.  Similarly, the spectacle of bones at.the Capuchin Convent elicits a kind of wide-eyed awe, if also some good-natured ribbing of their Monk guide, for whom

The catacombs of St. Callixtus.  Too many graves.  

this skull or that femur identified Brother Carlo or Brother Thomas.  Twain is serious, too, when he observes on a return to the Vatican, that despite all the Raphaels and Guidos and other old masters, "the sublime history of Rome remains unpainted!  They painted Virgins enough, and popes enough and saintly scarecrows enough, to people Paradise, almost, and these things are all they did paint."  (Twain as social historian, lacking material.)  The church comes in for criticism again at the Scala Santa, where Twain observes that "the Saviour...seems to be little importance any where in Rome"; it's all about Mary or the Popes, especially St. Peter. 

As the long chapter concludes, Twain confronts Rome's ghosts.  "I wished to write a real 'guide-book' chapter on this fascinating city, but I could not do it, because I have felt all the time like a boy in a candy-shop--there was everything to choose from, and yet no choice."  And that was that.  He was done.  "The surest way to stop writing about Rome," he wrote, "is to stop."  And he did.

Bill

Italy, Rome, and the Deportation of the Jews: Some Thoughts

The little girls at right, Fiorella and Luciana Anticoli,
 were among those sent to Auschwitz from Rome
 in October 1943

In our first Rome book, Rome the Second Time, we told the tragic story of Rome’s Jews, thousands of whom were rounded up and more than a thousand deported to German concentration camps in October 1943, never to return.  

When we wrote about the event in 2009, there was a plaque on a wall at the Tiburtina Station, remembering the day when Jews were loaded on the trains; it was on one of RST's itineraries. With the recent remodeling of the station, the plaque has disappeared, and with it one more piece of evidence that Italian--and Roman--Jews were among the victims of the Holocaust. 

The plaque - now gone - at Tiburtina Station in Rome

We were reminded of the absence of that plaque a few weeks ago, at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust--a bunker-like building on the western edge of Pan Pacific Park—where we had gone to hear Guri Schwarz, a professor at the University of Pisa and visiting professor at UCLA, talk about “The ‘Myth of the Good Italian’: Origins and Evolution.”  Schwartz described the larger myth as a series of denials, including the specific denial that Italians had some responsibility for the Holocaust.  

His talk focused on how and why that specific myth developed and spread.  One cause was the German/Italian dichotomy: the "bad" German and the "good" Italian.  Between 1943 (when Italy left the war) and 1947 (when the Paris peace treaty was ratified), Italy used this dichotomy to make the country look better, and hence to protect Italian national interests--essentially, to convince the Allied powers that Italy, even as a defeated country, deserved decent treatment under the peace accords.  In 1945, for example, Italian foreign minster Carlo Forza claimed the Germans were "bad" because they had come to Christianity 1000 years later than the Italians.  Upholders of the myth also claimed that Italy was "good" because, unlike Germany, which had a large Protestant population, it was a solidly Catholic country.

Prof. Guri Schwartz, speaking recently at the Los Angeles
Museum of the Holocaust

In addition, the “myth of the good Italian" helped Italians cope with their  disturbing history of Fascism--in essence, by denying it--and it was comforting in a more general way, as evidence that “Western Civilization” (closely identified with Italy's history) had not entirely succumbed under the pressure of totalitarianism. 

With respect to the Holocaust, the myth of the good Italian incorporated several ideas, all of them, according to Schwarz, essentially false: that anti-semitism had no roots in Italy; that the Italian racial laws of 1938 were rejected by the general population, and not implemented; that such anti-semitism as existed in Italy during the war was imitative of German anti-semitism; that in areas of Italian occupation (the Balkans, Greece, Southern France), the Jews were protected; and that deportation of Italian Jews was resisted by Italians. 

Surprisingly, even Italian Jews came to the support of the myth of the good Italian in the postwar years.  They did so, according to Schwarz, because the Jews that remained wanted and needed to re-integrate into Italian society, and re-integration required building bridges to neighbors, even if they had once been Fascists.  Moreover, as the war ended, tens of thousands of displaced Jews flowed through Italy on their way to Palestine, and Italy’s Jews wanted Italian authorities to support the movement of those persons. 

Stazione Tiburtina, where Rome's Jews boarded trains
 for Auschwitz

Schwarz did not say much about what actually happened to Italy’s Jews, though he did comment on that in the discussion that followed his talk.  He argued that after 1943, when Germany occupied the northern 2/3 of the Italian peninsula, Italian authorities assisted the Germans in rounding up and deporting Jews.  About 6,000 of Italy’s estimated 25,000 Jews were arrested, deported, and killed.  


Of those 6,000, Schwarz cited evidence evidence that one half were deported as a result of the efforts of Italians, or of Italians and Germans working together.  Schwarz also emphasized that Italy’s 1938 racial laws, aimed at Jews, were widely and thoroughly enforced, which indicates that Italians were not the reluctant anti-semites that the myth of the good Italian would suggest.  

These are very complex issues that have vexed historians for generations.  It is often pointed out that Italy’s history in dealing with Jews in this period is one of Europe’s best; the percentage of Italian Jews deported to the killing camps was one of the lowest in Europe--at 16% much better than France, for example—even though Italy was German-occupied for almost as long as the southern zone of France.  Writing in the March 6, 2014 issue of the New York Review of Books  (“Jews: How Vichy Made it Worse”), Robert Paxton argues, in contrast to Schwarz, that Italian police cooperation in deportation was “desultory.”  “To be sure,” he continues, “some Italian Fascist militiamen helped the Nazis hunt down Jews; it was they who arrested Primo Levi, for example, on December 13, 1943.  But the public largely refused to help them, and much of the administration dragged its feet.”  Paxton notes, too, that French views on the Jews were influenced to a considerable degree by anxiety over a great wave of foreign Jews that entered the country during the war—something that did not occur in Italy. 

There’s more to be said, of course.  Having become in thrall to another recent Los Angeles speaker, Alain De Botton, who believes deeply in the importance of humanism to civilized values, we would add only that Italy’s experience with art, music, and culture are deeper than any other nation’s, and this link held strong even under Fascism, when the Mussolini regime celebrated the arts—while the Nazis did

  

In 2010 and 2011, Rome embedded over 100 gold, 10cm square stones ("pietri d'inciampo," or "stumbling blocks) in Rome's streets, in remembrance of Jews, Roma, and others who died in the Holocaust.  The artist is German.  

their best to bury them.  It seems likely to us that some Italian Jews—possibly very many—survived because large numbers of Italians, even under Fascism, and even while supporting Mussolini's regime, remained decent and humane.  Guri Schwarz has made us aware that the "good Italian(s)" were not as good as we imagined, or hoped. But perhaps they were "better" than most.

Bill