reflections of Rome

We returned from the city after four days caught within its ceaseless movement. The city can be known, but only in part – never as a whole. To grasp the city in its totality requires multiple lifetimes no doubt, for Rome, as with perhaps any other such city, is in reality a multiplicity of cities that seem to converge and then separate again. The moments of convergence are most critical for the architect, for there, at that time, in that space, the typology of all urban artifacts can be glimpsed… albeit briefly. The forum of Trajan repeats the patterns of the street and the shop: the realms between which we exchange with the city: we breath in its soot and breath out its desire for grace …the monument that marks the time when the empire was broad, unending, and secured at its navel …the fragments from a myriad of different architectures that are now tumbled together (these fill our portmanteau sketchbooks). The city becomes a repository for our memories: we are at once both an individual and the City. These moments of convergence, now caught in notes taken and sketches made, reveal, if only slightly, the complex fabric and tortured grace of being human and longing for the divine.

Order appears in the most unlikely places, if we can but learn to see. In fact, I have found that the study abroad program has a deep rooted purposes: for us to return with eyes now open.

Having returned from the Rome of republic, of empire, of state, of the cosmopolitan energies of motorbikes and politics, replete with its strange and complex rituals and dance of food and exchange, of streets which play out as theater, of the ambiguity between museum artifact and living, seething, organism… it is now strange to think that we will never leave this city. Like Kavafy's Ithaca, it will remain with us, where it perhaps has always been.

To see Rome is to look through a glass darkly and find our own visage, partially obscured, and somehow caught between despondency and hope…