"It makes you feel small, and it is meant to. It also makes you feel big, because the nobler parts of it were raised by members of your own species. It shows you what you cannot imagine doing, which is one of the beginnings of wisdom."
This is the writer Robert Hughes on the city of Rome, the Italian capital and locus of perhaps the greatest civilization in ancient history. Suffused with masterful works of painting, architecture and sculpture by some of art history's heavy hitters (Raphael, Michelangelo, Bernini, Caravaggio), it's little surprise that this highly opinionated art critic would choose Rome as the subject of an entire book-length study. But lest you think "Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History" is a 512-page love letter to the city from a blindly adoring fan, it's not.
In fact, Hughes' fervent disdain for what modern Rome has become ("an enormous concretion of human glory and human error") makes this such a rewarding read. Of course, there's much fawning over what Rome has given human history — but the majority of it is relegated to the first half of the book, which takes us from the city's mythic founding by two young boys raised by a she-wolf through the rise of Christendom at the expense of pagan beliefs and culminating in the cultural glories of the Renaissance and Baroque eras.
The hallmark of " Rome" is undoubtedly Hughes' writing, which can be captivating ("Saturnine, coarse, and queer, [Caravaggio] thrashed about in the etiquette of early Seicento Rome like a shark in a net."), biting ("Rome today originates nothing."), and sometimes childish ("Italian television … is crap, always has been, and will never be anything else.") He's certainly a fierce critic; you'll never be confused as to where he stands on a subject.
Hughes' stories and asides are fascinating, most of them adding layers of depth and character to a portrait of a city built (and continuously rebuilt) on the ruins of the past; sometimes even changing our perception of it. For example, while our image of classical Rome is undoubtedly furnished with white marble, the truth, according to Hughes, is that it was a "Calcutta-on-the-Mediterranean — crowded, chaotic, and filthy."
And there are other stories: about relic hunting in medieval Rome, where merely touching a saint's remains with a cloth made it a relic in itself through "holy contagion"; the flood of English artists to 18th-century Rome who saw the city as "history's great finishing school"; and the attempts by Futurist thinkers to eliminate pasta from the Italian diet. Most are factual, but some are mythical. Does it matter? No. As a habitual Roman saying goes, "if it's not true, it ought to be."
You're probably not going to want to visit Rome after reading this book; Hughes' views on modern Roman history and tourism are less than flattering. But one gets the sense after reading "Rome" that the city's best years are long gone, probably never to return.
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