A Map of Rome
On walking and wayfinding long ago in the Eternal City.
I: “Nobody who has not taken one can imagine the beauty of a walk through Rome by full moon,” reported Goethe to his Roman journal in February of 1787. “All details are swallowed up by the huge masses of light and shadow, and only the biggest and most general outlines are visible…. Like the human spirit, the sun and the moon have a quite different task to perform here than they have in other places, for here their glance is returned by gigantic, solid masses.” Those masses, certainly, are more than buildings, the big and general outlines more than merely architectural: in the Eternal City all human time seems to be gathered and shaped into the ruins and monuments of a manifest yet still mysterious destiny. Indeed, as much as they describe the sensations engendered by a moonlit walk through the streets, Goethe’s lines call to mind the grand and evocative engraved survey of the city executed in the same century by Rome’s prodigious envisioner, Giovanni Battista Piranesi. In Piranesi’s one thousand etchings of the city’s ancient and modern aspects, we hear what Marguerite Yourcenar has aptly characterized as “the deep song of a meditation on the life and death of forms at once visual and metaphysical.” Partly as a result of the power and pervasiveness of Piranesi’s archive of light, shade, and structure, it is that song we often here whenever we try to catch, in contemplation, the melody of Rome.
On the streets, of course, other songs are sung. If not the terror of the traffic nor the tenacity of young importunists, the volubility of the Romans and the pleasures of the table will call you repeatedly from whatever profound reflections may occupy your mind. This conversation between the ideal and the actual is one of Rome’s distinguishing characteristics: you are never out of earshot of either voice for long. Their constant dialogue provides a depth of expression, a resonance of symbol and event, that suggest meanings within your ken but beyond your measure.
On our last visit to Rome, now far too long ago, my wife Margot and I struck up an acquaintance with a gentleman named Marco Caggiatti, who, one Sunday afternoon, was dining alone at a table adjacent to ours in a restaurant near the Palazzo Borghese. One thing led to another, and the next evening, our new friend — employed in industrial public relations, he was also a poet and the author of a book, in Italian, on modern American verse — took us to dinner at an old and elegant Roman restaurant. After dinner — it was nearly midnight — Marco marshaled our energies for a moonlight tour: we strolled through the Piazza di Spagna to the Trevi Fountain, then up the hill to the Piazza del Quirinale. While the grand piazza is surrounded on three sides by palaces (one of which is the official residence of the Italian president), its fourth is open to a stunning view that stretches far out over the Campo Marzio and across the Tiber. This magnificent vista added an appropriately celestial dimension — the starstruck view was capped, off in the distance, by the great dome of Saint Peter’s — to our last night in Rome. Descending the Quirinal Hill, we spent another three quarters of an hour on foot, before entering, through the Piazza Navona, the vicinity of our hotel.
Inspired by the singularity of the occasion, and encouraged, no doubt, by my knowledge of Marco’s poetical concerns (to say nothing of the wine), I attempted to convey to him what the night’s walk, indeed what several holidays’ worth of Roman walking, meant to me. Gesturing to encompass the nocturnal space we passed through — such a perfect setting for a poem! — I turned to him and spoke, in stumbling Italian and then in English:
“I feel, on these streets, in this piazza, like a thought in a mind.”
He looked puzzled, then nodded pleasantly. I wasn’t sure he understood what I was trying to say. For a long time, I’ve been trying to figure it out myself.
II: Several years earlier, I had spent my first full morning in Rome looking for Paris par arrondissement. That’s the name of the little book of maps that made my orientation to Paris seem easy a year or two before. Before the advent of GPS, at least, even the Parisians themselves swore by it. As an index to a city, Paris par arrondissement was nearly ideal: measuring about four by five-and-three-quarters inches, it was conveniently portable in pocket, and, because its gazetteer was so comprehensive, its maps so lucid and accurate, it assured even the neophyte tourist that he could grasp the metropolis in the palm of his hand. It helped too that much of the city, as revised by Baron Haussmann in the nineteenth century, has a plan that directs one’s attention, and then one’s feet, down grand avenues and boulevards: one surveys as one strolls straight, tree-lined thoroughfares in which space itself is sensuous, a lavish presence in which the sidewalks and buildings luxuriate. One is always walking into a space more public than that housed by one’s privacy.
But there I was, stuck in Rome. I wanted to know where I was, and how to get to where I wanted to go — the Forum, the Sistine Chapel, whatever church it was that housed Michelangelo’s Moses — as directly as possible. At every newsstand I’d ask for a little book of maps that corresponded to the Parisian vade mecum which had served me so well. Carta … tutta città … un libro … piccolo . . . I wasn’t sure if I was being understood, and the vocabulary I was piecing together from ancient (ancient to me, that is) Latin was all I had to rely on. Each sortie across the language barrier yielded the same single-sheet map with the sites of Rome highlighted rather garishly (like those maps to the homes of movie stars one used to get in Beverly Hills). I summoned the strength to follow my weak words into an impressive bookstore on the Via del Corso — the clerks as distinguished and well-dressed as maitre-d’s — with no more luck. All roads might lead to Rome, but once you got there, it seemed, you were on your own.
I didn’t walk out of the bookshop empty-handed, though; too many years of habit promised otherwise. I’d parsed the system of the shelves well enough to work my way round to a copy of one of my favorite books, ltalo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which, for purely symbolic purposes, I wanted to possess in its original language.
Invisible Cities is as magical a construction of words as I’ve ever come across. Purporting to be a record of conversations between Marco Polo and Genghis Khan, in which the inveterate traveler describes to the Great Khan the many extraordinary cities he has encountered in his wanderings, the book is a cluster of insight, invention, and charm. “What is the city today, for us?” Calvino has said apropos his masterpiece. “I believe that I have written something like the last love poem addressed to the city…. A city is a combination of many things: memories, desires, signs of a language; it is a place of exchange, as any textbook of economic history will tell you — only these exchanges are not just trade in goods, they also involve words, desires, and memories.” In his figurative classifications of the shapes cities assume in our imagination — Cities and memory; Cities and desire; Cities and signs; Thin Cities; Continuous Cities; Hidden Cities; Cities and names — Calvino provides us with a lyrical mythology of urban form that is nothing less than a catalog of human consciousness. It’s fun to read, too.
When I presented it for purchase, the bookseller, minutes away from my strained attempts to mouth the word “map,” launched a jolly stream of language whose meaning rushed right past me. He gave me a knowing look, and I arched an eyebrow toward the knowledge my ignorance intuited: just because we don’t have the book of maps you want, he was surely joking, there’s no need to assume the city is invisible.
But the gods work in mysterious ways, even in bookstores; and, in retrospect at least, it’s clear to me that the volume I found that first day in Rome was more appropriate to my arrival there than the book I sought.
III: For — except in maps — what city is visible? Of course, the streets we traverse are processions of the palpable: buildings and pedestrians; vendors and vehicles; flash, flesh, and stone; an occupying army of odors. But, as an entity, a city eludes our apprehension: it is too big, it has swallowed too much time, it has digested too many extremes of experience to be comprehended by our eyes. We can describe the city, chart its avenues and architecture, its history and economy, its popular and esoteric passions, yet still its essence is something else entirely, like the self which reflects upon the details of our days, or the mind that mediates between the world and the weltering network of neurons which delivers that world to us. Both real and metaphorical, the city is a creature that has an existence which — to borrow an elegant figure from Norman Mailer — “is separate from its description, even as you and I have an existence which is separate from the fact that we weigh so many pounds and stand so many inches tall.” (It is Rome’s “separate existence” — its imaginative life, if you will — that is so cunningly captured in Piranesi’s art, with its preternatural ability to render the meaning and melancholy of time as precisely as it measures the solidity of stone.)
Most often, almost by definition, a map ignores the “separate existence” of its subject, confining its description to common components — streets and landmarks, parks and other public spaces — in order to orient the traveler or clarify his passage. A map turns space, and all the knowledge space suggests, into information, which, being charted and indexed, we might easily master. What I had been pursuing in the guise of Paris par arrondissement was more than assured itineraries: I wanted to possess Rome in some efficient, authoritative way, to find a tonic for my tourist’s timidity and a quick fix for the ignorance I felt in the face of the city’s centuries of life. From the moment of my arrival the previous day, however, the city — in the wisdom of its years, no doubt — had conspired against me: it had lessons to teach that a map would only obscure.
You stalk the city, compass drawn, amazed
at the longing that fills each direction. The voice
you hear is now your own — no angel could be
so intimate with your uncertainty.
Where is the city? Where, at last, are you?
You think you’re lost but as you turn you find
a wall enclosing you, its sweep embracing
your lines of sight like some truss for your dreams.
You locate yourself by this outer limit,
this circle of stones that constellates you.
IV: On that morning of arrival, when the friends who were to meet me at the airport failed to appear, I picked up my bags and sought out the Alitalia shuttle bus which, I had been informed, ferried tourists into the center of the city. Tired, hungry, anxious, I was in no magnanimous mood as the great soul of Rome rose up to envelop me. Coursing down the autostrada in a lumbering vehicle that did nothing to transport thought or spirit, I traversed the Roman campagna without one poetical reflection. When my senses suspected sites would soon be coming into view — we were off the highway, finally, and approaching the city — I perked up a bit. To my surprise, the first monument to catch my eye was a pyramid. Then the bus broke down; it was, I see in ominous retrospect, just outside the Porta San Paolo, one of the city’s ancient gates.
The pyramid, I would later learn, is the tomb of Caius Cestius, praetor, tribune of the people, and caterer (actually, he was one of the septemviri epulones, the seven priests in charge of solemn public banquets); it was erected before his death in 12 BC. The light reflecting from its stately white facade would have been among the last things that struck St. Paul as he was led to his execution along Via Ostiense around 62 AD. (His martyrdom is commemorated by the Church of Saint Paul Outside the Walls about a mile down the Ostian Way).
The massive fortified gateway to the right of the pyramid, the Porta San Paolo (it was originally called Porta Ostiensis) was built two centuries after the monument to Caius Cestius, when the Emperor Aurelian erected his great wall to keep out the Alemanni. Standing a few hundred yards away from it after I had exited the broken bus, I did not dwell on the gate’s looming presence. I was trying, in the tangle of languages about me, to find out what I should do next. On reflection, of course, my next step ought to have been obvious: Rome was offering me a rite of passage in the shape of the Porta San Paolo just ahead, a door into my own small destiny within its walls. In another life, the parallel biography of my imagination, I pick up my bags (this being the imagination, they are of course very light and no hindrance to my perambulation) and walk toward the gate. A trail of English follows me: Who alive can say / “Thou art no poet; may’st not tell thy dreams”?
It’s Keats, raising his faint voice from among the cypresses that cool his shade in the Protestant Cemetery adjacent to the pyramid. Blessing myself with the poet’s benediction, I pass through the gate and cross the city’s threshold.
The passage through an ancient city wall, even a wall as grand and as grave as that of Emperor Aurelian, strikes the modern observer — accustomed to viewing the city as a place of diffusion, of traffic, with all roads as avenues for the arrival and departure, the incessant violence of vehicles — as absurdly small. Not much could pass through it easily, our eyes report. We’re oblivious to the obvious ramifications of the massive ring of meted, mounted stones: what’s outside must be kept out there. An ancient traveler would pass through that gate with a sure knowledge, not only of arrival, but of translation from one realm to another: from outside to inside. Each step on the old path to Rome, each step on the road to any ancient city, was a step toward concentration, toward interiority, for cities arose out of humanity’s need for an inside more secure and ordered than the unmeasured, immeasurable expanse of the world in which it found itself. Like the paleolithic caves at Lascaux or Altamira, to which primitive people retreated with their first thoughts, the earliest cities are an emblem of the evolutionary rite of passage into human consciousness, a passage that yielded the knowledge that the mind is separate from the world beyond it, possessed of its own inner life. “Mind takes form in the city,” writes Lewis Mumford in The Culture of Cities; it began to do so by building a wall around itself.
You enter the city in your first step
toward concentration. With each step you take
there is so much more to see — does the city
grow right out of your senses? Buildings are
sprouting, walls going up, evoked by your
eyes’ most sudden humor. Lines of buildings
run ahead of your sight from ground to sky
and back again, so the place is just as
you picture it, one step ahead of your
every desire. What do you wish, and why?
V: “Rome is a unique city,” said one of its mayors, G. C. Argan, an art historian, “it was never designed according to the calculations of economists or sociologists but has always been imagined.” One of its great imaginers was Sigmund Freud, who took a peculiarly long time in fulfilling his early wish to visit the city, although it occupied — as The Interpretation of Dreams reveals — a continuing and important presence in his dream life. Discussing the structure of memory in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud even compares the mind of an individual to the Eternal City:
Now let us make the fantastic supposition that Rome were not a human dwellingplace, but a mental entity with just as long and varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived alongside the latest. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars were still standing on the Palatine and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus was still towering to its old height; that the beautiful statues were still standing in the colonnade of the Castle of St. Angelo, as they were up to its siege by the Goths, and so on. But more still: where the Palazzo Caffarelli stands there would also be, without this being removed, the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, not merely in its latest form, moreover, as the Romans of the Caesars saw it, but also in its earliest shape, when it still wore an Etruscan design and was adorned with terra-cotta antefixae. Where the Coliseum stands now we could at the same time admire Nero’s Golden House; on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon as bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but on the same site also Agrippa’s original edifice; indeed, the same ground would support the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the old temple over which it was built. And the observer would need merely to shift the focus of his eyes, perhaps, or change his position, in order to call up a view of either the one or the other. [see Note 1]
At the end of this elaborate, beautifully drawn analogy, Freud reins in the enthusiasm of his expression: “There is clearly no object in spinning this fantasy further,” he writes; the analogy fails, he asserts, because the elements of a city perish and do not survive alongside one another, while the elements of the mind — so psychoanalytic theory posits — are conserved in their entirety, no matter how deeply they may be buried.
In this case, as in others, I think Freud’s metaphor knows more than his science, for the city — with its ruins and its half-remembered rituals, its layers of time and its bustling surface of traffic, its monuments and its inscrutable facades, its endless avenues of symbol and association — is more like the minds we make up as we grow than Freud’s model of an unfailing mental archive. We walk through the city just as we scurry or saunter through the streets of our own consciousness, assuming our past, navigating our present, fathoming our future. Life’s tenses expand and contract, the remembrance, history, and prophecy they contain subject to patterns of use and neglect, affection and apathy, recognition and rehabilitation, inspiration and invention. Might we not even extend the reach of Freud’s original analogy, and call the city a psychic space where time and memory create meaning? Rome certainly suggests this in its every aspect, which goes a short way toward explaining Freud’s fascination with it, and a long way toward explaining my gnomic remark to Marco Caggiatti.
VI: Given its wealth of history, culture, ruins, and religion, it’s easy to think of Rome as an archetype rather than a living place (“Yes, too easy!” I hear the reader shout), to imagine walking through its gates accompanied by the ghost of Keats, to explore the ruins of time and mind Piranesi mapped so magnificently, to wander into the city of dreams. But the traffic of modernity has no truck with rites of passage: it sweeps one past the gates of cities as quickly as it can. A second Alitalia bus pulled up and I climbed aboard.
Hours later, having found a pensione, showered and napped and settled myself a bit, having connected with my errant friends, I set out with them for a late afternoon tour of the city. Out on the streets at last, the worries of arrival behind me, I again stumbled into a kind of daydream. I felt like a stargazer discovering the constellations: every shard of the city offered a light to my inner eye, and my imagination was quick to connect them into fabulous figures. I was entranced, inspirited, exhilarated. The bristling traffic was a clamorous chatter that concealed profounder conversations: every piazza poised a paragraph for my consideration, each corner composed a lesson addressed to some element of my education: family heritage, Catholicism, classical studies, literary learning — even my sense of humor and gesture, so schooled by the films of Fellini. I wanted to walk as fast as I could, to linger as long as I liked in this spot or that, to encourage the inspirations of the senses. I didn’t want to stop while my companions bought film, loaded cameras, took photographs.
I disliked photographs. Or, more properly, I hated what photographs could do to one’s attention if one wasn’t very careful, or a very gifted photographer. This hadn’t always been the case. A few summers earlier, having left a career as a producer of educational audiovisual programs, I had taken a long drive across, around, and about America. When I set out, my camera was close at hand, and for a week or so I used it to document and annotate my passage westward from New York. By the time I got to Tennessee, however, I had banished my Pentax to the deepest recesses of my car’s trunk, because it had slowly but surely overtaken the purview of my eyes: I wasn’t seeing landscapes, or animals, or architecture, I was seeing pictures. “That’s a great photo,” my eye would automatically decide as it lit on something of interest, and I would then take care to make purely photographic significance of the scene or object I had apprehended. The frame of the camera distanced me from what I had driven many miles to reach. I could have been looking at images in a book, which, no doubt, would have been better than my own. By means of its marvelous powers of retention and reproduction, photography had altered my own mechanism of seeing. The camera kept me from watching the world before me, from entering it in a way that made any real sense of my presence in it. [see Note 2] I would have to learn to look all over again.
That first afternoon in Rome, waiting impatiently while my new friends found film, fiddled with their lenses, and took their photographs of Saint Peter’s Square and assorted fountains, I launched into — in the seething quiet of my own mind — my screed against photography. I thought of a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Les Carabiniers, in which the two somewhat dim protagonists (named, amusingly, Michelangelo and Ulysses) return from a stint as soldiers with the spoils of war: a suitcase of booty that contains nothing but postcards, hundreds of them, of classified treasures — Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art — from around the globe.
Had I come to the Eternal City to collect an assortment of slides and postcards? Certainly not. I had work to do, new perceptions to discover, ancient wisdom to sample; there were poems to write, epiphanies to trip over! My exasperation was only momentarily directed at my camera-toting friends before I focused it directly on its proper subject. Clicking a quick self-portrait, I recognized the timid features that had brought me to this impasse. I had arrived in Rome, in so many ways the capital of my imagination, and was afraid to explore it by my own devices. It was well and good to eschew photography in favor of experience, but not if you were going to waste your own precious time watching other people take pictures. Having found the comfort of company, what I wanted now was to be alone. I pulled the most experienced member of our party aside.
“Which way is the Forum?” I asked.
He gestured behind him.
“I’ll meet you at your room at seven,” I said, and set off to lose myself in the past.
VII: I got lost presently. I had set off at a brisk pace, and after about ten minutes of determined walking toward the Forum — or so I thought — I entered, from another direction, the same piazza I had so confidently left. My photographing friends were nowhere to be seen. I took out my pocket guide to Rome with its cramped maps and tried to reconstruct my journey. The maps were no help, so I retraced my path physically as best I could. With a few missteps, I made my way back to the piazza from the point I had first left it.
I tried an experiment. I left the piazza by a third route, wandered a bit, and journeyed back. I did this a few more times, widening my orbit. Since the streets offered only a walker’s perspective — the buildings were small, just a few storeys high, yet they hugged their vivid lanes close enough to tunnel one’s vision — the confining sightlines made it impossible to orient oneself to any landmark beyond the immediate field of vision. It was impossible to chart quickly an ordered picture of the space one’s walking described.
I never made it to the Forum, but consumed the remaining hours of the afternoon continuing my advance-and-retreat navigation of the small area my bewildered explorations tried to interpret. Shifting my locus from one piazza to another, I moved slowly in the direction of the pensione, the slight curve of each street’s path pulling me off-course at a constant but unremarked rate. In my timorous state, I welcomed the recognizable sites I stumbled upon not for the pleasure of their age or beauty, but because they allowed me to chart my position on the map I carried, which lacked enough detail to clearly mark the streets I was traversing. Bumping into the Pantheon (for even a monument as magnificent as this is hidden from the walker’s sight until he is upon it), I could at least measure my progress toward my room. First thing tomorrow, I vowed, I’d find a Roman version of Paris par arrondissemont and get a grip on myself in this city. But you know what happens to the best laid plans.
You’ve come to found the city, but here
it is already, buildings, towers, parks,
monuments. The shadows are long, they start
to speak, calling to you from inside the wall.
Still, the streets are paved beneath your feet
with a history that stems from the top
of your spine, it’s spread out before you
like a radiating dream-this way, that,
till your mind wanders up to a confusion
of corners: it’s there that traffic starts.
VIII: The next morning, as I stood outside the bookstore, clutching my neatly wrapped parcel of Invisible Cities, I hovered on the periphery of whirling traffic — Vespas and Fiats and rumbling buses, hurrying around turns like kamikaze atoms — I felt like a particle of Newtonian physics that had just been informed of the uncertainty principle. Where, in the midst of all these hunks and colors, was Rome?
I started off to the right, darted across the avenue, and pointed myself down the first crooked street that promised some surcease from the cacophony of moving cars. (This being Rome, there would be no escape from parked cars, which attach themselves to any patch of pavement with the ineluctable intent of lichens). I walked briskly, hoping speed would carry confidence in its wake, and in a way it did, for I had soon exhausted my first alley and without hesitation set off down another, then a third, and so on, all decisions as to direction — right? left? straight? — left to serendipity. Consoled between the ochre walls of the cobbled passageways, my attention — drawn to the workshops of the craftsmen and tradespeople (jewelers and watchmakers, furniture restorers, antique dealers, produce distributors, merchants hoarding their wares in shadowy, secret stores) that opened on the street — took little notice of the fact that I had no idea where I was. I had fallen into my first, and deepest, Roman infatuation, with what Allan B. Jacobs, in his fine book Great Streets, celebrates as
the old, long-continuing medieval street that usually winds at least a little, is relatively narrow, has about it a certain sense of mystery, determined largely as a result of its tightness, its relatively tall buildings, and an inability to see from one end to another. What is there beyond where you can see?
To find out, you have to keep walking.
Which is just what I did. I abandoned all hope of mapping my steps and reveled, instead, in wandering. I quickly learned that while the labyrinth of medieval streets wreaked havoc with one’s sense of direction (as they must have with a cartographer’s measurements — it was no wonder the guidebook maps were inexact, incomplete, unhelpful), the existence of so many memorable monuments, unpredictable as their location might be on any given walk, made it impossible to lose one’s bearings for long. Approaching each corner by their own devices, my senses — attuned to the dynamic composition of light, stone, and human activity that advertised each small avenue, to the aesthetic invitations of windows and doorways and street-teasing courtyards — exercised an authority they seldom enjoyed. Come this way, my eyes ordered, summoned by a subtle sweep of sunlight; now here, said the nose, beckoned by a bakery’s aroma. Every few minutes my strolling mind, like the street which channeled it, would empty into a larger, public space, from which several new paths would flow. I soon bumped into the Pantheon again, this time from the front, where I was summoned to attention by the magnificent building’s shouting inscription: M. AGRIPPA L.F. COS TERTIUM FECIT (Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, Consul for the third time, made this). A few minutes later l drifted into the Piazza Navona (which, since I didn’t recognize it immediately, I was sure for a moment I had discovered: had anybody else ever noticed how beautiful it was?). After many more windings, I reached the bank of the mighty Tiber, its fabled waters the color of bad coffee with a lot of milk. Across the river, the Castel Sant’ Angelo loomed against the sky. After my morning in the cramped medieval streets, the powerful structure — its construction begun in the year 130 by the Emperor Hadrian — announced the beginning of an entirely different story. I turned back the way I had come, eager to get lost again.
IX: “As a modern youth,” writes Ivan Illich,
from childhood on I was trained to the Baedeker. As a mountain guide I learned to decipher maps and photographs before venturing into the rock. Decades later, when I first arrived in Japan I purchased a map of Tokyo. But I was not allowed to use it. My host’s wife simply refused to let me map my way through the city’s mazes by looking at them, mentally from above. Day after day she led me around this, and then that corner, until I could navigate the labyrinth and reach my destinations without ever knowing abstractly where I was. [see Note 3]
Modern modes of learning, as Illich goes on to suggest, disqualify us for this kind of “mapless orientation.” Our schools, our photographs, our maps (and, as Illich notes in his own context, even such “technologies” of the book as the table of contents and the index, whose medieval invention his own research intriguingly chronicles) order our intelligence to such degrees that the orientation itself often usurps the position of experience. Knowledge is reduced to its most easily charted characteristics: we can consult indices to find whatever information we seek, without the discoveries and digressions that reading through context provide; we can transplant places — and our own past — from their significant settings: photographs render all things portable, and available to all; we can precisely measure our walks before we take them, allowing maps a definitive power over our activities and explorations. The utility of such methods of organizing knowledge are obvious: an index, for instance, allows us to search vast amounts of data efficiently and to quickly find what we need; photographs are valuable documents, and often subtle and sophisticated aide-memoires; maps keep us from getting lost; and the current digital power of search (and surveillance) engines, GPS, and all the assorted flavors of data-driven aids now available to manage time, space, and intention has its obvious benefits (albeit hiding a calamity of insidious effects).
Nonetheless, the rewards and satisfactions of “mapless orientation” appear, on reflection, ever more valuable, and profoundly so. Those first days I wandered about in Rome, I stumbled upon the gift Illich received at the hands of his Japanese hostess: the streets I trod were present to me in a way they would not have been had I selected the route they traced from a map (or an app). Walking the medieval streets without a guide, I was constantly adjusting my sense of where I was, until, after enough weeks of walking, I knew. This knowledge was not abstract knowledge of a plan, but what Illich aptly calls “a psychomotor, personally shaped activity.” In such activities, I think, volition and conduct leave their root meanings and inch toward their wider connotations. Information is translated into meaning. The personally shaped activity shapes, in turn, the person: every perception is an incarnation. [see Note 4] My model of Rome, measured by my feet, was a model of myself as well.
In Rome, as I discovered the morning I gave up my search for mapped certainties, the act of walking was blessed with intuitions: parsing my way through the city’s periods with only a hint of the stories they told, I sensed that here the inner life might come upon a wider context for its self-assured significances, might find a public language worthy of its private weight. For the city exists to draw us out, to pull our privacy down its cramped street into the public square. In the space of the city, subjective consciousness meets its objective match.
And? And finds, or at least maps, a city of its own.
X: The “mapping” of the self’s city is an emergent process; meaning is made, not found. We make up our minds as we go along, for human truths are narrative rather than oracular: they are infused with time. And time, the medium of life, demands its due.
“When we open our eyes in the morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see,” writes Oliver Sacks in An Anthropologist on Mars. “We make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection.” Which is just the way I made my way around Rome, engraving streets into my nervous system with the incessant etching of my feet. There was a lot of time in my map, hours and hours sunk into the streets I walked, steeping my attention in the centuries of sensations the ochre walls retained. The map I drew according to my own devices was personal, certainly only partial, and — as I suspect would be revealed if I were quizzed by a knowledgeable inquisitor — probably not all that accurate. Yet it served me well enough on my travels, and even better in my memory.
After my last trip to Italy, however, I was fortunate to obtain an exquisitely executed facsimile of a map worthy of the Eternal City. It would be no help to a walker — it’s far too grand in every way for portable use — but it offers solace to the wandering mind, an objective correlative of the subjective setting of Roman memories. The 1748 plan of the city by Giambattista Nolli is a masterpiece of engraving and cartography; as Alan Ceen writes, “There has never been a more exact, complete contemporary plan of the city before or since.”
Perusing the sheets of the plan and following the path of a familiar walk, I marveled, again and again, at its art. Far more than photography or painting, I think, engraving — even when its subject matter is curtailed by the measured reach of mapping — captures in a distinctive way the essence of the Eternal City, evoking in its black, white, and gray elegance the city’s fabric of structure, space, and, especially, time. There is something almost palpably meditative in the accomplished orchestration of light and shadow, in the ability of an engraving to suggest both the solid marble of monuments and the melancholy anatomy of ruins.
The painter David Hockney has spoken of the different ways in which time inhabits visual media. A photograph, he argues, is temporally static: “As your eye moves across the surface of the photograph it’s the same time at the top left corner of the picture as it is in the bottom right. In fact it’s the same time in the middle and in every area of the photograph….” In contrast, a painting has time layered into it by the moving hand of the artist. “As your eye moves across the surface of a Canaletto,” Hockney notes, “each area of the painting is a different time; it was done at a different moment.” Time, of course, is incised by hand and acid into the copper plate of an engraving, as — in the cases, certainly, of both Nolli and Piranesi — is the perception of the artist who has not only surveyed his subject, but watched it carefully as well. Engravings are suffused with memory, and memory, as Hockney notes, is the keystone of vision: “there is no such thing as objective vision. There can never be, because even the memory of the first instant of looking is then a part of the perception, and it adds up and it adds up.”
The fourth of ltalo Calvino’s invisible cities is Zaira, city of high bastions:
The city . . . does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
The description applies equally well to Rome, to the images of Rome engraved by Nolli and Piranesi, and for the city of the self as contemplated by Dr. Sacks.
There’s no escaping the city you dream, there’s no
other course but to find or found it. Where
this leads you never know, you journey out,
return, you close your eyes, you stare. You seek
yourself walking, you come across your thoughts
like accidents of form, shapely as clouds
that float above your body as far from you
as the voice that’s talking, sounding each
hollow in the wall of your skull with echoes
that answer the city’s anthem: for the city’s
a terminal for all expression, palindrome of minds.
XI: “I find it becoming more and more difficult to give a proper account of my stay in Rome,” wrote Goethe. “The more I see of this city, the more I feel myself getting into deep waters.” Might it be because the poet found in Rome a city worthy of his inner life?
It is surely no accident that cities and history, cities and writing, indeed, cities and consciousness itself rise up at the border of prehistory where time slips out of mind. The human imagination demanded the space the walls of the city captured; the city, in turned, shaped the imagination. Perhaps we can view the city, then, as a “transitional space” in the evolution of consciousness, separating civilization from “mother” nature. The ancient traveler passing through the gates of the city enters a mind akin to, but separate from, his own: a network of streets and symbols, arts and activities, in which consciousness finds a context that is both self and not-self, human but not individual; a context which is both constant and created anew by each mind that confronts it.
As infants, perhaps, we experience the world the way my ancient and imagined pilgrim, passing through the monumental gate, encounters the newly-minted city. So, at least, much thinking on the subject of child psychology suggests. As we get older, our creativity constrained by the limits — and by the security — of guidebook and map (and app and search engine), our self-definition too often becomes divisible by the least common denominator, our inner life locked in the basement rooms of our routines. We run from “transitional spaces” whenever they appear, for our imaginations are no longer supple or subtle enough to lose ourselves in them. But once in a while, in reading or in travel, in solitude or love, our learning and our luck conspire to awaken the aspirations of what I can only call the soul. And, as we recall it to ourselves, we introduce it to the world again, and set it free to map its way.
So might we see the walker in Rome as an infant discovering — within a city so many have shared — his own world of time and mind, symbol and memory, a world in which his human inwardness can find, in Shakespeare’s phrase, a local habitation and a name.
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[Note 1] From Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by Joan Riviere. I quote Riviere’s 1930 translation because it seems to me more graceful and eloquent than others. For an elucidating discussion of Freud’s imaginative relations with Rome, see Alexander Welsh’s Freud’s Wishful Dream Book.
[Note 2] In his introduction to Venice in Old Photographs, John Julius Norwich eloquently addresses the same concerns:
The camera. Nowadays it has much to answer for. How many are the photographs taken every day from the Ponte della Paglia of the Bridge of Sighs — but how few are the photographers whom after their compulsory clicks, take a minute or two to look at what they have photographed! It is a curious quirk of human nature that impels people who have willingly spent hundreds — sometimes thousands of pounds flying halfway round the earth to reach the Parthenon or the Taj Mahal actually to view it when they get there only through a little tiny window, conceiving of it exclusively in terms of apertures and shutter speeds. In an ideal world it would surely be illegal to photograph any building without having looked at it for at least five minutes — and, if possible, without having walked all the way round it too. For John Ruskin — who knew more than most people about the architectural beauties of Venice — even that would not have been enough. “Don’t look at buildings,” he used to tell his students, “watch them.”
Norwich was writing a few decades ago, around the time of the trip I am recalling in this essay, and both he (may he rest in peace) and I are surely showing our age. Reflections on what the ubiquity of mobile phones and their splendid cameras has done to the apprehension of time and place, of presence itself — to say nothing of the consequent corruption of attention — would require more space and thought than I can command.
[Note 3] lllich’s provocative research into the history of the book in In the Vineyard of the Text is filled with stimulating ideas and remarkable information: he highlights, for instance, the twelfth-century invention of the alphabetical index, pointing out the astonishing fact that it never occurred to eighty-five generations of alphabet users — nearly three millennia worth! — to organize things alphabetically.
[Note 4] Interestingly, if some avenues of neurological research are any guide, this figure of speech may prove to be literally true. In his Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, which attempts to explain how the phenomenon of mind emerges from the brain’s bundle of tissue, Gerald Edelman posits — in a body of work rich with physiological detail and neurological complexity — that experience acts upon the unique neuronal pattern of connections each of us is created with, “modifying it,” as Oliver Sacks explains, “by selectively strengthening or weakening connections between neuronal groups, or creating entirely new connections.” Edelman call these connections “maps,” and they can be seen, in our context, as the neuronal record of the “mapless orientation” that, in the largest terms, describes our lives. That a person’s experience might have organic consequences makes the manner of our apprehension of reality all the more significant. For a cogent explication of Edelman’s ideas, see Sacks’s essay, “A New Vision of the Mind,” in Nature’s Imagination.
