Il romano non vi dirà mai: “ah, io non posso stare senza far niente!” Una domenica per lui non sarà mai una giornata vuota, nemmeno se dovesse riempirla soltanto d’ozio e di libertà solitaria.
A Roman will never say: “I can’t stand having nothing to do!” For him a Sunday will never be an empty day, not even if only filled with sloth and solitary pursuits.
- Manlio Lupinacci, Qui Roma. Milano: Touring Club Italiano. 1970.
(translation Miseraestupendacittà 2012)
In Memorium
Chuck Brown
Washington, D.C.’s Godfather of GoGo
(photograph found online, uncredited)
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
(photograph copyright Salzburg Festival)
Ormai non resta che battere
la [sudicia] città
in cerca di chi non c’è più.
- Dario Bellezza (da una poesia dattiloscritta con intervento
a mano), Come verrà distrutta Roma. Roma, CO2
*
By now nothing to do but beat
the [filthy] city
looking for who’s no longer there.
(translation Miseraestupendacittà 2012)
Always on top of things Roma Capitale felt the need to ticket Marcel out of the piazza
See his last performance today
John Cage Day
April 13, 2012 at 10:00
at John Cabot University
(photograph found online, uncredited)
The department of history and humanities at Rome’s John Cabot University presents a day dedicated to avant-garde American composer John Cage (1912-1992), as part of the worldwide celebrations on the centenary of his birth.
(from Wanted in Rome, online edition)
The sun hung dreaming under a delicate, whitish mist, into which not a single spurting column of smoke blended, because there were no factory smokestacks in sight, and no smoke came from any of the comical little tin chimneys sticking up from the buildings. Grayish yellow lichen lay on the old, rounded, rust-brown roof tiles, and greenery and small shrubs with yellow flowers grew along the eaves. Around the edges of the terraces stood silent, dead agaves in urns, and from the cornices twining plants spilled in silent, dead cascades. Wherever the upper story of a taller building loomed above its neighbors, dark, dead windows stared out from a red-yellow or gray-white wall — or else they slumbered with closed shutters. But of the mist rose loggias, looking like the stumps of old watchtowers, and arbors made of wood and tin had been erected on the rooftops.
And above everything hovered the church domes, a countless number
- Sigrid Undset, Jenny. Translated by Tiina Nunnally. Steerforth Press, 2002
