A Day on the Periphery: Torre di Righetti, and the Pleasures of Trullo

There's a plan afoot--it's even been funded--to repristinare (redo, clean up, refurbish) Torre di Righetti, a mid-19th-century tower, constructed for hunting (so we read), and the hill on which it sits: Monte Cucco. We had heard of Monte dei Cocci (another name for Monte Testaccio) and Monte Ciocci (Valle Aurelia, a flank of Monte Mario), but Monte Cucco remained a mystery. We found it on the outskirts of Trullo, one of our favorite near-in towns/suburbs, which is located south of long and winding via Portuense and west of the totally unwalkable viale Isacco Newton. Too far to walk, and not easy to get to.

Transportation Czar Dianne figured it out. Train from Stazione Tiburtina to the Magliana stop. Up the stairs to the bus stop, 719 bus 7 stops to the base of Monte Cucco. Perfect.

A few missteps up the hill, then asked a guy driving out of the only farmhouse (well fenced in) where the "Torre" was, then back down and up the only real "road."

Up the road. Nothing in sight yet. 

And there it was, virtually alone on the barren hilltop. In two years (or never) it will be rebuilt and, so we've read, will host art shows. We'll believe that when we see it. The Monte is to have bike paths and benches. The time to see the torre, and the monte, is now, in its evocative "ruins" state, as it's been for decades.

Dianne refused to enter Torre Righetti (fearing for her safety - crumbling buildings and all) until I mentioned that the hole in the center reminded me of the "light artist" James Turrell. 

To one side, superb views of two of EUR's most prominent buildings: the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (aka the Square Coliseum, now owned by Fendi) and the Basilica dei Santi Pietro e Paolo. They look closer than they are in the photo below.

As we learned from a small mural later that day in downtown Trullo, the hilltop was the site of a 1966 film by Pier Paolo Pasolini: "Uccellacci e Uccellini" ("Hawks and Sparrows"), starring Toto and Ninetto Davoli. (All our Roman friends knew the film and the locale, though they hadn't been there.)  A tree depicted in the mural (and presumably in the film) no longer exists. The Basilica appears in the mural.

Monte Cucco is also home to other ruins: a substantial villa/farmhouse, near a clump of trees. These are the ruins of early-19th-century Villa Baccelli, which belonged to  Guido Baccelli, Minister of Education several times in the early years of the State of Italy and, later, his son Alfredo. Higher up the hill we found what appears to have been a facility for animals (maybe feeding troughs). The farmhouse ruins include a long, steep, and deep tunnel (the opening to it freaked out Dianne too). We read the tunnel accesses what are known as Fairy Grottoes (le grotte delle fate), an underground quarry and caves, dating to the 6th century BCE and understood to be the residence of the God Silvanus (for the Latins) and Selvans (for the Etruscans). In the early 20th century the caves were used as an aircraft shelter.  

What's left of Villa Baccelli 

Tunnel to the "Fairy Grottoes," dating to the 6th century BCE 

 

What we thought were feeding troughs in an out-building.

It's just a 10-minute walk from the Torre to downtown Trullo (backtracking on the 719 bus route) and well worth the journey. Trullo is full of exceptional outdoor wall art, often presented with prose and poetry, and much of it on the sides of buildings that compose a 1940-era public housing project, still in decent shape and illustrative of an era when public authorities in the West still built housing for those with modest incomes. Just a sample or two to follow--don't want to spoil the experience. 

At the town's main intersection there's a substantial interior market and a couple of nice bars. That's Dianne enjoying a cafe Americano with a mural behind her.  The barista, who at first greeted us coolly, was very excited and voluble when he found we were not immediately going back to the United States but spent months in Rome.  After initially "overcharging" us, he gave us the locals' price, and free chocolate.

And, up a broad stair, what once was the city hall, now covered, in rather spectacular fashion, by leftist graffiti, wall art, and prose. For some years the building was occupied by leftist organizations, but at the moment it appears to be empty and closed. Enjoy the exterior before it, too, is "repristinatoed." 

A painting--and a poem--on the facade of what once was Trullo's city hall. Some of the writing here celebrates 30 years of "occupation" of the building (1987-2017), and the graffiti "spray artist" is writing "I hate prison. I love liberty."

As you walk around you may (or may not) see giant electrical towers. One by one they're being removed; those that remain are no longer functioning. 

To return to Rome: follow the main road (via del Trullo - not too pedestrian friendly, but walkable) south (retracing the bus route), then west to the frequent train at the Magliana stop, below.

Bill 

Quinto Sulpicio Massimo: the Child Poet who Studied Himself to Death

We've always enjoyed the eclectic frenzy of Piazza Fiume, at the juncture of Corso d'Italia and via Salaria, one of ancient Rome's consular roads. But there's a part of that eclectic mix that we've never understood: the jumble of "ruins" of various kinds on the north side of the piazza. Thanks to a morning newspaper, Il Messaggero, we now have a better understanding of what happened there, and when.

Looking through the fence (or over it) at the ruins, there's a statue of a small boy in a niche (above), with some writing to the sides and below, and below that, some large grey blocks of stone. You're looking at the tomb of Quinto Sulpicio Massimo (note the street sign with that name nearby to the right). Quinto was a prodigy, a boy genius, when at age eleven, in 94 d.c., he entered the third "Certamen Capitolinum," a contest featuring extemporaneous Greek poetry "readings." Rome's most famous poets competed--more than 50 of them were entered--but none performed so ably as young Quinto, who improvised 40 verses, no doubt astonishing those in attendance. Whether he won is not known.

Sadly, Quinto's career in oratory was cut tragically short. As the text around the niche explains, Quinto died a few days after the competition, weakened by "too much studying and his excessive love for the 'muse.'"




Quinto's tomb, and another beside it, remained intact for 2 centuries, protected from the barbarian invasion of 276 by the hastily constructed wall built under Emperor Marcus Aurelias' watch. According to Il Messaggero, his tomb was encased in one of the two towers of Porta Salaria.

Vespignani's Porta Salaria

You'll notice that there is no Porta Salaria. It didn't survive the cannons of the invading Goths under King Vitige in 537. Then (skipping ahead some 13 centuries), under the new Italian state, the Porta was rebuilt by Virginio Vespignani, only to be torn down in 1921 to open up the piazza. It was then that Quinto's story came to light: as Vespignani's work was being disassembled, workers uncovered the niche and statue--the "cippo"--that one sees today (although the statue is a copy; the original is in Centrale Montemartini, on via Ostiense).

The structures behind the tomb for many years housed the studio of sculpture Ettore Ferrari, who died in 1929. Among other large works, Ferrari created the statue of Giordano Bruno in Campo de' Fiori.

Somewhere back there was Ferrari's studio.  

And one more "treat." If you walk around the corner to your left (facing the tomb), and look up at the wall, you can't miss the latrine--a toilet--hanging off the side of the wall (on its outside, of course). At one time there were 260 latrines on the Aurelian wall, serving the soldiers who worked in the
fortification.

Convenient bathroom 

Bill

Czeslaw Milosz, "Campo de' Fiori" (1943)

The Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz

A friend we toured with in Rome a couple of years ago sent us this poem, "Campo de' Fiori."  We were unfamiliar with the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and with this poem, which is one of his better known pieces.  Milosz was born in Lithuania (1911) but lived in Poland and wrote poems and prose in Polish (the poem is translated). He spent World War II in Warsaw, then under a Nazi-imposed government.  Strongly anti-Communist, Milosz defected to the West in 1951 and became a U.S. citizen in 1970.  He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.

As Milosz has explained, the poem was not written inside the Warsaw ghetto, but it was written in Warsaw in 1943, not long before the 1944 uprising against the Nazis and the subsequent deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to extermination camps.

In this poem, Milosz describes a moment in the history of the Campo de' Fiori in order to understand the horrific events in wartime Warsaw.  The heretic mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo de' Fiori in 1600, the victim of the Catholic Church and a "mob" mentality, but in Milosz's poem it's as if the event barely happened: "Before the flames had died the taverns were full again," he writes. Something similar--something that reminds us of our inhumanity--he suggests, happened to Warsaw's Jews, who went to their deaths as "the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday."

 Bill

      Campo de' Fiori

                 By Czeslaw Milosz

                 Translated by Louis Iribarne

In Rome on the Campo de' Fiori

baskets of olives and lemons,

cobbles spattered with wine

and the wreckage of flowers.

Vendors cover the trestles

Statue of Giordano Bruno, Campo de' Fiori

with rose-pink fish;

armfuls of dark grapes

heaped on peach-down.

On this same square

they burned Giordano Bruno.

Henchmen kindled the pyre

close-pressed by the mob.

Before the flames had died                                

the taverns were full again,

baskets of olives and lemons

again on the vendors' shoulders.                          

I thought of the Campo de' Fiori

in Warsaw by the sky-carousel

one clear spring evening

to the strains of a carnival tune.

The bright melody drowned

the salvos from the ghetto wall,

and couples were flying

high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning

would drift dark kites along

and riders on the carousel

caught petals in midair.

That same hot wind

blew open the skirts of the girls

and the crowds were laughing

on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Someone will read as moral

that the people of Rome or Warsaw

haggle, laugh, make love

as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.



Someone else will read

of the passing of things human,                                    

of the oblivion

born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only

of the loneliness of the dying,

of how, when Giordano

climbed to his burning

he could not find

in any human tongue

words for mankind,

mankind who live on.

Already they were back at their wine

or peddled their white starfish,

baskets of olives and lemons

they had shouldered to the fair,

and he already distanced

as if centuries had passed

while they paused just a moment

for his flying in the fire.

Those dying here, the lonely

forgotten by the world,

our tongue becomes for them

the language of an ancient planet.

Until, when all is legend

and many years have passed,

on a new Campo de' Fiori

rage will kindle at a poet's word.

Poems for Everyone - A New Book Inspired by Piero della Francesca

The Rome connection here exists, but first we want to celebrate our long-time Italian friend, Dana Prescott’s new book, Feathers from the Angel’s Wing: Poems Inspired by the Paintings of Piero della Francesca. 

This gorgeous book was a labor of love for Dana, who lives at what must be the epicenter of the largest number of paintings in the world by this ever more-prized 15th-century, early Renaissance artist.  That location gave her the obsession (and yes, it is that) that led to the book.  As the New York Times complained a few years ago Piero ”took more commissions in Sansepolcro than anywhere else, and his greatest works remain in its vicinity — a source of great frustration for Piero obsessives outside of Europe, who must visit a series of small villages to see his frescoes and altarpieces.”  Though the Frick Museum in New York City now has acquired 4 Pieros and mounted a show in 2013 that the Times called “ravishing.”  The word applies equally to the emotion emanating from the poets Prescott has culled in this meaty book.

Madonna del Parto - is she opening her dress? pointing
to her rounded belly?  Are the angels opening or closing
the draperies?  Note the pomegranate design on the
curtain - a symbol of fertility.

The writers Prescott includes range from the established and revered (long after his death) Pier Paolo Pasolini to the American rock star/writer/poet Patti Smith.  But those two aren’t the alpha and the omega here.  Among the poems that touched me most are two that were read at a book launch in Rome in June.  Both of these poems were inspired by my favorite Piero, the Madonna del Parto (The Pregnant Madonna), which remains in Sansepolcro, where it is treasured as a good omen for pregnant women.  Moira Egan’s “Gravid,” composed of 2 9 line stanzas, each line of 9 syllables, includes the sentence:  “I said no to nature, then nature turned and said no to me.”  Contrasted with Egan’s “grief and guilt come in colors, dull red, queasy green,” is Mongolian poet G. Mend-Ooyo’s, “The Pregnant Madonna.” That poem takes us lyrically “Between the trees, grains thread their way across the fields….Each of the seeds is its own world.”  Mend-Ooyo, who grew up in a nomadic family, still has the nomad’s sense of the power of the earth. 

In her work as executive director of Civitella Ranieri, the international cultural center near Sansepolcro, Dana nurtures many translators.  Perhaps because of this background, she gives tribute to the many translators at work in her book as well, their bios given equal status with the poets.

I would be remiss in not pointing out the quality of this hardbound book – the paper, the colors, the reproductions.  It’s a beautiful gift to someone in your life. [At amazon.com, Powell’s and amazon.it.]

St. Luke, in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome

And, finally, the Rome connection to Piero is fragmentary and lost, both literally.  There are a few heavily damaged fragments of an unfinished ceiling work in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore.  Piero also painted frescoes on the walls of Pope Pius II’s rooms in the Vatican.  By order of Pope Julius II, they were painted over – by Raphael.

Dianne

Love Poems: on the Streets and Sidewalks of Rome

Rome's walls--the walls of buildings, the sides of trains and Metro cars--are full of graffiti, some of it reaching the level of art, some of it powerfully political, much of it juvenile scribbling. 

Much less common than wall writing, street and sidewalk graffiti appear here and there, most often on the city's ordinary and ugly asphalt sidewalks, but sometimes on the cobblestoned streets.  This form of writing is seldom political, and never artistic--at least not in the bold letters/colorful sense that one normally associates with the best graffiti.  The streets and sidewalks are a space for personal statements: congratulations and best wishes, vows of commitment, and poems of love. 

Among the simpler statements is "Buon Compleanno Princepessa" (Happy Birthday Princess) and "Claudia Ti Amo" (top) which hardly needs translating. 

From a street in Monteverde Vecchio

And "Auguri Dottoressa"--with the date, September 29, 2011.  Auguri means something like "best wishes," and while "Dottoressa" could mean a woman doctor, here it probably means a woman graduate of any program. 




The love poems proved surprisingly difficult to translate, and we sought help from our friend Massimo, a professional translator.

Here's one:

Tuscolano

                                                                                   
  15.09.11                         September 15, 2011
  Guardami negli occhi     Look me in the eye
  Dimmise non                 Tell me [dialect=dime se non] if you don't                           
  Vedi che io                     See that I
  Sono sempre                   Am always
  Qui X te                          Here for you

Massimo notes that X means "per"--that is, "for"--a custom that derives from the way Italians learn their multiplication tables: 2 X 2 is recited "due per due." 

Another poem:

A Garbatella manifesto

ora che                             now that
ora che 6 con me             now that you're with me
io vivo questo attimo       I live this moment
io vivo fino in fondo        I live fully [to the end of time?]
con te                               with you

Here "6" means "you are" because, in Italian, "6" and "you are" are both spelled and
pronounced "sei." 

And our final example:

Tuscolano

Accettami cosi...Ti          Accept me as I am
Prego..non guarda           Please do not look [see below]
..Nella mia testa              Into my most personal thoughts
Ce un mondo da             
Ignorare!                         There is a world to ignore
28.10.11 Ti Amo             October 28, 2011  I love you

Massimo suggests that this poem might have been penned by a non-native Italian: in the second line, "non guarda" should be "non guardare."  Or perhaps the letters "re" are on the white curb and not visible--or the author ran out of space. 

When we found this last poem, it had been on the sidewalk for about 8 months--obviously written with indelible paint.

Bill

RST Top 40. #3: Via Tasso



The poet Tasso in a mental institution in Ferrara.
Painting by Eugene Delacroix. 

For knowledgeable Romans, via Tasso has two meanings--two, that is, besides the obvious: an unimposing street that runs northwest for 5 blocks from behind the Scala Santa in front of San Giovanni in Laterano.  One of the other meanings, of which we were made aware only recently, by way of Goethe's many references, is the brilliant, influential 16th-century poet Torquato Tasso.  Born in Sorrento, Tasso spent his most productive (and most frustrating) years in Ferrara, where he wrote the lyrical epic Gerusalemme Liberata (1574) and, two years later, was incarcerated in a mental institution, perhaps for conduct that was only intemperate.  He died in Rome in 1595,  a few days before he was to receive from the Pope the "crown of laurels" as the king of poets.

The other meaning of via Tasso is starkly different: the Nazis' political torture prison.  The official name is the Historical Museum of the Liberation--it's open and you can visit-- but what happened here at via Tasso 145 was hardly liberating.  Between September 1943, when the Germans occupied Rome, and June 1944, when the city was liberated by allied armies, the prison on via Tasso--now often called simply "via Tasso"--was the scene of torture, abuse, and death for hundreds of prisoners, among them Jews, partisans, and the innocent.  Late in March, 1944, all the prisoners housed at via Tasso were removed and summarily executed at the Fosse Ardeatine, caves just outside the city.

Via Tasso is a haunting place to visit.  Many of the rooms of the prison now hold exhibits and documents, some of which we have translated from the Italian in Rome the Second Time.  But some of the cells are still there, and there, especially, one can see--and feel--the anguish of those held here.  A reader of a February 5 post on the Fosse Ardeatine sent us these lines (the translation is the reader's, too), scratched by a prisoner into the wall of his cell, returning us to the man Tasso, to his experience as a prisoner, and to the relationship of poetry to the human spirit.

L'anima a Dio
La vita al re
Il cuore alla donna
L'onore per me

My soul to God
My life to the king
My heart to my wife
My honour to myself


Bill

The Voice of Rome: Giuseppe Gioachino Belli

The minute a man becomes a priest,
that priest becomes a man made holy,
and no matter how he may sin, his sin
will fly away from him like a cricket from a net.




We welcome journalist and translator Frederika Randall, our guest blogger for this post. Randall left New York for Milan in 1986 and now lives in Rome. She has written about Italian society, arts, literature, film and culture for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and now reports on politics for The Nation and on books for the Italian weekly Internazionale. With a grant from the PEN Translation Fund, she is completing a translation of Luigi Meneghello's Libera Nos a Malo. The translations below are hers.


_______________________________________________________________
If you’ve taken the tram up or down viale Trastevere, you’ve probably caught sight of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. He’s the pensive gent in the top hat looking down from
a white travertine monument, just across Ponte Garibaldi on the Trastevere side of the river. “To their poet” says the inscription on the base, “from the people of Rome.” There’s also some fancy allegorical relief work front and back, courtesy of Belle Epoque sculptor Michele Tripisciano. Once upon a time Trastevere, once one of Rome’s poorest neighborhoods. This little corner was dedicated to Belli in 1910, when a group of poets petitioned mayor Ernesto Nathan to rename the square Piazza G.G. Belli and took up a public collection to pay for the monument.

Despite some attempts to put his poems into English, Belli isn’t very well known outside Italy--even though Pier Paolo Pasolini once called him “the greatest Italian poet.” Significantly, he didn’t say “greatest dialect poet,” the title by which Belli is usually known but one that seems to hedge its bets about whether literature in dialect is really literature. For Belli wrote not in standard Italian but in Romanesco, the lowlife Roman vernacular. Pasolini, poet, master of dialect, and a lover of lowlife Rome himself, knew whereof he spoke.

Giuseppe Gioachino Belli was born in Rome in 1791, just on the cusp of the French revolution. He died in 1863, only a few years before the Italian army defeated the backward, despotic Papal States— a theocratic regime, we’d call it today--and claimed the city of Rome as Italian territory. The seizure of Rome in 1870 was the last, symbolic act in the long unification process of the Risorgimento, a movement with strong secular and progressive currents.
Belli, a subject and employee of Papal Rome, thus lived out his life in a reactionary backwater during the century in which liberté, egalité and fraternité were the battlecries of change across Europe. (Rudolf Wiegmann's 1834 painting at right,looking down the Tevere with St. Peter's in the distance, captures something of that world).

And yet, Belli was nothing if not a man of his times, with all their contradictions. An accountant and later a censor in the Vatican bureaucracy, he belonged to the small Roman middle class, squeezed between the lordly, wealthy ecclesiastical elite, and the abundant masses. He was anything but a man of the people, yet in a wild burst of creativity during the 1820s and 30s he wrote some 2,279 sonnets, all in the rough and ready street language of the Roman populace, Romanesco.

It’s a dialect with a mouthful of consonants and a way of lopping words off after the accented syllable. The Romans say bbuono instead of buono, “good” and they say fà instead of fare, “to do”. Until the mid-20th century, most people in Rome spoke Romanesco, just as most Italians spoke one of the scores of local dialects as their first (and often only) language. Only the literate spoke, and read Italian. Though Belli’s sonnets were composed nearly two hundred years ago, the language still sounds a lot like that spoken on the streets of Rome today. As much as a language, Romanesco is a mode of expression: caustic, vivid, and frequently very vulgar.

Apart from his style and pizzaz as a poet, Belli was an astute observer and early ethnographer, making note, in witty rhyming stanzas, of the political beliefs and religious credences, the social customs and verbal expressions, the hopes and the
fears of the Romans. He “delved into plebeian sentiments as into his id, his other: the dark, misshapen bottom not only of society but of individual consciousness,” said Luigi Meneghello, himself a wonderful dialect writer and a great admirer of Belli. Something of a ventriloquist, Belli sometimes used “the people” as a mouthpiece to say things that otherwise it would be awkward, or even dangerous to say. But he also had an undeniable feeling for the humblest Romans, not unlike the painter (unknown) who depicted Italy's class divide in two rooms of an osteria, above.

Belli had been well-educated by the Jesuits, reading widely as a young man, both the eccelesiastical literature, and great philosophes of his day (Voltaire was a favorite). Although he was fascinated by the new ideas of the Enlightenment, he was also a loyal subject and employee of the papacy. Perhaps the only way he could cope with his divided loyalties and voice his enthusiasm for the liberatory, democratic and anti-clerical ideas coming from France was to put them in the mouths of the Roman proletariat: so Italian critic Pietro Gibellini has suggested.

But when Rome actually put those ideas into practice with the great Risorgimental uprising, the Roman Republic of 1849, Belli was so traumatized that he never wrote a single line of Romanesco again. The sonnets went unpublished in his lifetime. As an old man, he repudiated his Romanesco writings and asked that the sonnets be burned after his death. Luckily, his friend and executor, Bishop Vincenzo Tizzani, chose not to carry out that request.

“I wanted to leave a monument to the Roman plebe,” was how Belli once accounted for those 2,279 sonnets. The plebe: the Roman masses, poor, illiterate, disenfranchised, policed by the papal Carabinieri and kept in line by regular hangings in St. Peter’s Square. Belli gave voice to their pleasures, their misery, their cynicism and their deep fatalism—so deep for example that many, like the poet himself, actually abhorred the Risorgimento and its struggle to free Rome from papal rule, unable to imagine or countenance such momentous change.

In his very best sonnets, the witty, disenchanted voice of Rome’s populace is twined with the poet’s own wit and intellect. His barbs about religious dogmatism, authoritarian rule, about the gulf between society’s haves and its have-nots can sound remarkably fresh in the 21st century. Whether he’s writing about man’s tyranny over the animal kingdom (The Beasts of Earthly Paradise), about the justice meted out to the poor (The Precious Dead), about the hypocrisy of priests (The Priest), or about the Grand Tour’s perverse fascination with the gloomy Roman countryside and its “genuine” farmer’s cheese (The Wasteland), you can hear the hiss of anger, the sting of sarcasm, the snap of vulgarity, as if it were today.

Frederika Randall

*****
For English translations of selected Belli sonnets see: Anthony Burgess, in the appendix to his novel Abba Abba; Harold Norse, The Roman Sonnets of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli; Miller Williams, Sonnets of Giuseppe Belli; Mike Stocks, Sonnets-Giuseppe Gioachino Belli.



L’amore de li morti

A sto paese tutti li penzieri,
tutte le lòro carità ccristiane
so ppe li morti; e appena more un cane
je si smoveno tutti li bbraghieri.

E ccataletti, e mmoccoli, e incenzieri,
e asperge, e uffizi, e mmusiche, e campane,
e mmesse, e ccatafarchi, e bbonemane,
e indurgenze, e ppitaffi, e ccimiteri!…

E intanto pe li vivi, poveretti!
gabbelle, ghijjottine, passaporti,
mano-reggie, galerre e ccavalletti.

E i vivi poi-poi, bboni o ccattivi,
so cquarche ccosa mejjo de li morti:
non fuss’antro pe cquesto che ssò vvivi.

Sept. 19, 1835



The Precious Dead

In this town, all the attention,
all the faith, hope and charity,
go to the dead. Just let a dog die
and the whole place springs to life.


The litter, the candles, the incense burners,
the holy water, the matins, the music, the church bells,
the masses, the fancy biers, the gratuities,
the indulgences, the cemeteries, the epitaphs...

And meanwhile for the living—the unlucky—
taxes and customs, identity papers and guillotines,
the “by the authority vested in me”, the prison, the rack.

Yet in the end the living, good or bad,
are still better off than the dead,
for one thing, at least they’re still with us.

--tr. F. Randall

Er prete
Ar momento c’un omo fa pprete
sto prete è un omo ggià ssantificato;
e cquantunque peccassi, er zu’ peccato
vola via com’un grillo da una rete.

Er dì ssanto a cchi pporta le pianete
è ccome er carcerà cchi è ccarcerato,
come scummunicà un scummunicato,
com’er dì a cquattro ladri “In quanti sete?”

Certe cose la ggente ricamata
nun le capissce, e ffra nnoantri soli
se pò ttrovà la verità sfacciata.

Sortanto da noantri stracciaroli
se sa cchi è un prete. La crasse allevata
pijja sempre li scesci pe ffascioli.

April 3, 1836


The Priest

The minute a man becomes a priest,
that priest becomes a man made holy,
and no matter how he may sin, his sin
will fly away from him like a cricket from a net.

To say “holy” to him wearing the chasuble
is like putting a man who’s a prisoner in prison,
it’s like excommunicating the excommunicato,
it’s like asking four robbers, “how many are you?”

There are some things that the embroidered ones
can’t understand, and it’s only among us others
that you find the unvarnished truth.

Only we others, the trash pickers,
know what a priest is. The comfortable classes
can’t tell the difference between corn and beans

--tr. F. Randall




Le bestie der Paradiso terrestre

Primo d’Adamo senza dubbio arcuno
er ceto delle bbestie de llà fòri
fascévano una vita da siggnori
senza dipenne un cazzo da ggnisuno.

Ggnente cucchieri, ggnente cacciatori,
nò mmascelli, nò bbòtte, nò ddiggiuno…
e rriguardo ar parlà, pparlava oggnuno
come parleno adesso li dottori.

Venuto però Adamo a ffà er padrone,
écchete l’archibbusci e la mazzola,
le carozze e ‘r zughillo der bastone.

E quello è stato er primo tempo in cui
l’omo levò a le bbestie la parola
pe pparlà ssolo e avé rraggione lui.

December 19, 1834



The Beasts of Earthly Paradise

Before there was Adam, heaven knows,
in the animal kingdom up there,
they lived like real gentlemen,
without having to depend fuck-all on man.

No coachmen, no hunters,
no butchers, no beatings, no fish on Fridays…
and as for speaking, they all spoke
as fine as professors talk today.

But when Adam became the boss
there now appeared the gun and mace,
the carriage and the lick of the whip.

And that was when for the first time,
a man disarmed the beasts of speech
so he would always win the case.

--tr. F. Randall


Er deserto

Dio me ne guardi, Cristo e la Madonna
d'annà ppiù ppe ggiuncata a sto precojjo.
Prima... che posso dì?... pprima me vojjo
fa ccastrà dda un norcino a la Ritonna.

Fà ddiesci mijja e nun vedé una fronna!
Imbatte ammalappena in quarche scojjo!
Dapertutto un zilenzio com'un ojjo,
che ssi strilli nun c'è cchi tt'arisponna!

Dove te vorti una campaggna rasa
come sce sii passata la pianozza
senza manco l'impronta d'una casa!

L'unica cosa sola c'ho trovato
in tutt'er viaggio, è stata una bbarrozza
cor barrozzaro ggiù mmorto ammazzato.

March 26, 1836


The Wasteland (the Campagna Romana)
God help me, Christ and the Madonna,
may I never go out again to get that cheese from the farmer.
I’d rather…what can I say?…I’d rather
be castrated by a sausage-vendor at the Pantheon.

You do ten miles and never see a tree!
At most you stumble over a few rocks.
And all around, a silence thick as oil,
so if you scream, there’s no one there to hear.

Everywhere you turn, bare, scraped land,
as if the carpenter had passed his plane,
and nowhere, not even the shadow, of a house.

The one and only thing I ever saw
on the whole trip, was an upturned cart,
and lying by its side the driver. Dead.

--tr. F. Randall




[The last image is Paul Flandrin, Campagna Romana (1840); the second-to-last is Adolf Luben (1832-1905), Visitation of the Sick; above that, Henri Regnault (1843-1871), The Old Flea Market in Piazza Montanara]