In the spring my wife and I vacationed in Rome. We lodged in a rooftop apartment on the Esquiline Hill. From its terrace we had a fine view of the Colosseum, which was just down the street, and the dome of St. Peter’s further off in the distance. In between the two was the white mass of the monument to the first king of united Italy, Vittorio Emanuele.
It so happened that while we were in Rome the parliament chose the new president of the republic, Giorgio Napolitano. One Monday a motorcade took him to the parliament building, where he was sworn in and gave his inaugural address, and then to the Vittorio Emanuele monument, which is not only a memorial to that king but also includes the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. With an honor guard, Napolitano walked up the long flight of steps to the tomb, where a wreath was laid. Lining the steps were soldiers in their finery.
As I watched the proceedings on television (yes, when in foreign countries I turn the set on, in order to brush up on the language), the camera alternately showed close-ups of the new president and the soldiers and wide-angle shots of Rome. I could not help but feel that there was an incongruity between the Rome of antiquity and the Rome of today.
Behind the Vittorio Emanuele monument is the excavated Roman Forum, the seat of government of ancient Rome. Across the Tiber is Vatican City, the seat of the papacy, the only institution in the world that can trace itself uninterruptedly all the way back to the time of the caesars. The papacy was here when the Roman Forum was not a collection of ruins but the lively core of a great city. The ancient Romans who inhabited the city disappeared many centuries ago, as Rome became depopulated after the fall of its empire. Today’s inhabitants of Rome are the territorial successors, but not the biological successors, of the Romans of the first century.
I have been reading Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860. The first chapter gives a précis of the back-stabbing (literally) politics of city-states that incessantly warred against one another. It was not until the year of the book’s publication that the many principalities of Italy were united into one country under Vittorio Emanuele—with the exception of Rome and the Papal States, which were absorbed a decade later. In political terms, the Italy we know is a new country, newer than the United States.
The pageantry surrounding President Napolitano’s first day in office could not obscure the fact that while land and even buildings perdure, people and institutions change, often irretrievably. The Rome of 2006 is and is not the Rome of A.D. 60. In many ways, a Catholic pilgrim has more connection to the Rome of Augustus and Peter than does the modern, secular resident of Rome. The one has claim to the stones, the other to the meaning of the stones.