the cassandra pages

Rome VI: St. Valentine

The Tiber Island, looking east: Trastevere would be on the right, and Rome on the left.

We often crossed the Tiber from Trastevere to Rome at the eastern end of its island via the Ponte Fabricio, the oldest surviving Roman bridge across the river, which was constructed in the year 62, when Cicero was consul of Rome. A Latin inscription on the bridge still reads "Lucius Fabricius, Son of Gaius, Superintendent of the roads, took care and likewise approved that it be built." From this bridge I always noticed the umbrella pines crowning the top of the Palatine Hill, in the distance, and closer, a tall medieval bell tower.

There are two Roman temples just beyond the end of the bridge, and beyond them on the corner, an old church beneath that bell tower. Every time we walked past, there was a line of tourists waiting to take a picture of themselves with their hand inside the mouth of a giant, circular, stone face in the church's portico - the Bocca della Verita, or Mouth of Truth - which, according to legend, will snap shut on the hand of a liar. Because of our aversion to the hoards of selfie-stick-toting tourists, we were well into our second week before we entered the church, at a time when the portico was closed.

There are so many churches in Rome, and almost all are so Baroque, that we became used to bracing ourselves for a visual onslaught. So it was impossible not to sigh when we entered the utterly simple interior of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, a Byzantine church built in the 8th century on top of an ancient temple of Hercules and decorated by Greek monks who were escaping the iconoclastic persecutions that were prevalent in the Eastern Church at that time. The church was badly damaged by the Norman invasion in 1084 and the medieval bell tower - the tallest in Rome - was added when restorations were made.

This is a portion of Santa Maria in Cosmedin's Cosmati pavement, a mosaic technique named after the Cosmati family who pioneered this style of work in Rome in the 12th century; it is similar to some kinds of Byzantine mosaic, but instead of using stones all the same size, Cosmati work uses varying sizes framed by white marble. This sort of inlay spread in Europe; the most northern example is the Cosmatesque pavement of the high altar at Westminster Abbey, unusual because the stones are set into a dark surrounding substrate. My quilter's eyes were dazzled by the variety of patterns here, and the colors of the stones, which art historians think were mostly sliced-up bits of broken, ruined Roman monuments scattered around the city, recycled into these floors during the middle ages.

 

Although the church is no longer used by a congregation, it felt holier than many of the others we visited. We returned several times to absorb its quiet atmosphere and sit for a while in the beauty of the plaster walls and astonishing floor.

 

There are few visitors: most of the tourists have followed their guidebook's list of Romans "must-see"s to the Bocca della Verite, and afterwards merely stick their heads in the church door, see nothing of interest, and then leave.

A recording of Orthodox chants plays at all times, contributing to the calm and quiet. The music carries faintly into the stone crypt below the main altar, hollowed out from volcanic blocks that formed the central podium of the much earlier Roman temple. In this crypt are a small marble altar and candle-lit niches that once held the relics of early Christians, removed from the catacombs by Pope Hadrian in the 8th century.

Inlaid wall decorations above the entrance to the crypt.

I was wandering around upstairs when I found myself in front of a chapel where a flower-crowned skull rested on the altar, and was rather shocked to see that it was labeled "St. Valentine."

Reliquary with St. Valentine's skull (Wikipedia)

There are conflicting hagiographies and several different martyrs by the name "Valentine," but the story I like best says that he was a Roman priest in the 3rd century; this Valentine secretly married couples, in defiance of Emperor Claudius, so that the husbands would be able to escape military service and going off to war. The priest was arrested. The Emperor met the prisoner and came to like him, but when Valentine tried to convert him to Christianity -- or, alternately, when Valentine refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods - Claudius changed his mind and had him beaten with clubs and then beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate, and buried in an unmarked grave, from which his followers later removed his body. Churches as widely separated as Dublin, Madrid, and Prague claim to house St. Valentine's burial site or relics, but I think I will just decide to believe that the skull of the patron saint of lovers, whose Feast Day is February 14, is this one.

Rome V: The Gates of Janus

January.

There's a space of time after the end of one year when the new one seems suspended in time, like a train on the platform that we haven't yet boarded, or a person -- awaited but unknown -- who stands on our doorstep, still outside the circle of our acquaintance. We move forward reluctantly, still held by the past: the Christmas tree  in the living room, the half-filled tins of cookies, the messages we intended to write over the holidays that still need to be sent. We resolve all sorts of new beginnings but the brandy-soaked fruitcake, baked late, is still improving, and the community pool isn't yet open; surely my good intentions can be put off a few days longer. 

Epiphany and Twelfth Night come and go. We've sung all the Christmas music; my choir folder is empty for the first time since September. I've written "2017" a few times now, and each of those Roman numerals inked on the page or appearing on my screen cuts a chink in the armor of the past year; it weakens as the numbers grow into double digits: eight, ten, twelve. The tree has to come down, says my husband, it would be so much easier to do it during this warmer spell. I agree, but bargain for the weekend. He's right, though. The holly berries are brown and falling off their stems, and even the persimmons, which I so happily drew and painted through the season, are soft and shriveled.

Here we are, then, on January 12th. I've finally finished a project that belonged to last year and feel ready to stop procrastinating about several new ones. But I realize that it is not just any new year that's holding me back, it's this year, and the uncertainty about what lies ahead. If I could hold back time, I would.

So I spend my morning reading about ancient Rome and the fall of empire. My intention for the months ahead is to writing something longer about Rome, and about my own life, for which some of these blog posts are notes, a draft. It's difficult to give shape to something formless, but that is the challenge and pull as well. One of the last books I read in 2016 was The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector, in which she shows us her own reluctance to give shape to her protagonist, who both attracts and repels her, perhaps because she senses what she will be forced to do to her in the course of the short novel of her life, in order to be true to the person she is inventing. In this new year where we feel such a lack of control, this exploration of the process of creativity felt somehow comforting.

 

Silver Roman didrachm from 225-12 BC

Janus, one of the most ancient Roman deities, is always depicted with two faces. He has been associated with the month of January from the time of King Numa Pompilius, seven centuries before Christ. Numa was the second of the seven legendary kings of Rome who ruled after the city's founding by Romulus. He is credited with adding two months, January and February, to the Roman Calendar which formerly began in March and ran through December, followed by an unnamed winter gap of 56 days. The Romans continued to celebrate the New Year at the beginning of March until 154 BC, when the Senate declared January 1 to be the start of the year, probably as an acknowledgement of Janus, whose faces look forward to the future and backward toward the past.

Janus was the god of beginnings, symbolized by gates and doorways; his name, ianus, also means an arcade or covered walkway in Latin, while ianua became the word for any double-sided door, such as an entrance door to a home or the entrance to a temple. 

Numa Pompilius is also considered to be the builder of the Temple of Janus, in about 700 BC, one of the earliest buildings in the Roman Forum. The temple was small and rectangular, open to the sky, and enclosed by bronze gates.

According to tradition, the gates of the Temple of Janus were closed when Rome was at war, and opened when at peace. In the Aeneid, Virgil mentions that the gates were closed when the war began between the Latins and the Trojans; Augustus boasted that he had closed the gates three times during his reign.

Sestertius of Nero, 64-66 AD

The emperor Nero issued this coin, showing the closed gates of the temple, in 64-66 AD. It commemorates the end of war with Armenia; the legend reads: PACE P[opuli] R[omani] TERRA MARIQ[ue] PARTA IANVM CLVSIT ("Since the peace of the Roman People was established on land and sea, he closed the Shrine of Janus").

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The closing of the gates was a big deal, accompanied by ceremonies and proclamations, because it so seldom happened; throughout the centuries Rome was rarely at peace. I can't think of any modern equivalent to these temple gates, certainly not in America, where the waging of undeclared war has fallen to new depths. My sense of dread is not necessarily about wars to come, but more about how war is even defined in 2017. Despite the outward appearance and gentle rhetoric of the Obama administration, America has been engaged in an escalating drone war throughout these eight years, a war that would certainly have continued and perhaps increased under Clinton. Special forces are covertly deployed in many countries; a new 30-year program will modernize and refurbish America's nuclear capability rather than dismantling it. I doubt that even an erratic president will allow a nuclear exchange. But terror abroad and at home, random acts of murder by disturbed persons (often, sadly, military veterans), domestic police violence, racial and ethnic profiling, detentions and deportations, surveillance, and - perhaps most important of all - the divisions in society in general, have increased and will continue to do so, along with the anxiety of human beings everywhere, and the desperate needs of refugees fleeing violence. So it is not a case of closed gates and open ones, as any intelligent person knows, but the emperors would always like us to think so.