Wilhelm Waiblinger
November 22 (21), 1804 – Heilbronn
January 17, 1830 – Roma
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Roemische Freuden
Corso, Theater, und Akadamie, Oktober und Giostra,
Essen und Trinken, man lebt einzig, damit man’s geniest
Herzlichen Glueckwunsch, Herr Poet!
Past All Souls’
photo copyright Misera e stupenda città. 2009
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Solo l’amare, solo il conoscere
conta, non l’aver amato,
non l’aver conosciuto
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il pianto della scavatrice
Past All Souls’
photo copyright Misera e stupenda città. 2009
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We with our bodily eyes see but the fashion
and Manners of one country for one age –
and then we die –
John Keats, December 31, 1818
Palimpsests
…all these remains of ancient Rome are found dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis which has grown up in the last few centuries since the Renaissance. There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings. This is the manner in which the past is preserved in historical sites like Rome.
Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past–an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean in Rome that the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimus Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S.Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand–without the Palazzo having to be removed–the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terracotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other.
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization & its Discontents
Intolerable
August 22, 2009 – gay couple attacked, one beaten, one knifed, exiting “Gay Village”
August 25, 2009 – new attack on the club Qube, host of a weekly gay night
September 2, 2009 – two package bombs detonated in Rome’s “Gay Street”
October 11, 2009 – gay couple attacked during the day near via del Corso
October 14, 2009 – gay couple harassed & threatened during the day in via dei Fori Imperiali
October 24, 2009 – young man severely beaten for appearing to be “gay”
Il futuro non è più quello di una volta
“The future is no longer what it once was”
photo copyright: Misera e stupenda città. 2009.
Una vecchia signora
Salutami Roma (stando lontani si pensa soprattutto alle sue meraviglie ma so bene che a viverci la si maledisce spesso – abbi un po’ di pazienza con lei, è in fondo una vecchia signora viziata!)
Greet Rome for me (far away mainly one recalls her wonders but I know quite well when living there one will curse her often – have a bit of patience with her, in the end she’s an old, spoiled signora!)
- Paola Cesaroni
Magna Mater
But in Rome, the centre of Western civilization, it was otherwise: there it was the Phrygian god who was in possession; the dominating position held by the cult of Attis and Magna Mater [...]
The first of the Oriental cults to gain a footing in the Imperial city, the worship of the Magna Mater of Pessinonte was, for a time, rigidly confined within the limits of her sanctuary. The orgiastic ritual of the priests of Kybele made at first little appeal to the more disciplined temperament of the Roman population. By degrees, however, it won its way, and by the reign of Claudius had become so popular that that emperor instituted public feasts in honour of Kybele and Attis, feasts which were celebrated at the Spring solstice, March 15-27th.
As the public feast increased in opularity, so did the Mystery feast, of which the initiated alone were privileged to partake, acquire a symbolic significance: the foods partaken of became ‘a food of spiritual life, intended to sustain the initiate in the trials of existence.’ [...]
- Jessie Weston From Ritual to Romance
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Tra l’altro il fiume Almone era protagonista di un imprtante culto di origine orientale, la “Lavatio Matris Deum“, che si svolgeva il 27 marzo di ogni anno proprio dove le acque sfociano nel Tevere: dal tempio sul Palatino, una solenne processione portava la pietra sacra alla Magna Mater (la dea Cibele) fino all’Ostiense, e li si purificavano l’immagine e gli arnesi del culto nell’acqua dell’Almone. L’importante cerimonia duro’ fino al 389 d.C., anno in cui fu abolita per incompatibilita’ con la religione cristiana.
- La storia ci racconta: visita guidata al patrimonio storico-artistico della via Latina e della valle della Caffarella
Cosma e Damiano
Back-lit figure in a window above Cosma e Damiano hands on the sill – via dei Fori Imperiali almost empty, wind, cold; glint of water on the stones
