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City of the Soul
The entrance into the heart of Rome from the north is through a monumental medieval gate in the ancient Aurelian Wall that suddenly thrusts the visitor into the spacious magnificence of the Piazza del Popolo, one of the city's most beautiful squares. For about a year I walked under this portico every morning on my way to whatever the day would bring. The year was 1949 and I lived then in a small two-room apartment on the Via Flaminia, a couple of blocks away. It was the period of my life when I was studying singing, still hoping for a career in opera as a lyric tenor, while supporting myself as a part-time journalist, mainly as a stringer for the Rome bureau of Time-Life. I always tried to arrive in the piazza early enough to have a cappuccino at the Café Rosati, on the southwestern side of the square, from where I could sit out in the open, read a morning newspaper, and occasionally look out over the great sweep of space, punctuated at its center by the Egyptian obelisk of Ramses III, to the heights of the Pincio gardens across the way. Rome is nothing if not a feast for the eyes. I lived in the city then as an adopted Roman and thought that I would never leave it.
I had spent most of the first eight years of my life in Rome. My mother, Natalia Danesi Murray, was a native Roman, the oldest of three daughters born to an editor and printer named Giulio Danesi and his wife, Ester Danesi Traversari. Giulio died suddenly of septicemia in 1915, leaving Ester nearly penniless. The young widow went to work as a journalist to support herself and her children, became the first Italian female war correspondent by visiting the Austrian front in 1918, and went on to found and edit two leading women's magazines, until forced to flee to the United States in 1936 by her opposition to the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. My mother had married an American talent agent, after whom I was named, but had soon after separated from him. She was in Italy with me when he went broke in the stockmarket crash of 1929 and she went to work in the theater as an actress and singer to support us. When she brought me back to America in the fall of 1934, I spoke only Italian and French. I soon learned English, however, and became a totally American kid, refusing even to speak Italian at home with my mother and grandmother. My love of music brought me back to Italy in 1947, after the Second World War, when I was twenty-one. I could study there far more cheaply than in the States, and most of the great opera singers I admired were Italian. Within a year of my arrival I had again become fluent in the language and comfortably at home among the ancient stones of the city's centro storico, its historic heart.
I had also discovered that I had a family connection to the Piazza del Popolo. The square was named after the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, first erected as a small chapel in 1099 diagonally across from where I sat every morning nursing my cappuccino. The site was chosen to liberate the populace from the frightening nocturnal apparitions of the hated Emperor Nero's ghost, whose tomb was reportedly located directly under where the main altar now stands. At the time the chapel was built, the piazza didn't exist; it was merely an open space of vineyards and vegetable plots. In 1227, Pope Gregory IX built the original church. It was torn down and replaced by the present one in 1472, under the supervision of Pope Sixtus V, who was also mostly responsible for the shape the piazza eventually assumed. He placed the obelisk, originally imported from Heliopolis by the Emperor Augustus, in its heart, providing a focus around which, over the centuries, the square assumed its present form.
There are now three churches on the piazza; in 1660 Pope Alexander VII commissioned the building of the twin edifices of Santa Maria di Monte Santo and Santa Maria dei Miracoli, at the southern end, from which three main avenues lead into the centro. But neither is as historically interesting or artistically significant as Santa Maria del Popolo, where, soon after my return to Rome, I was able to look up one of my ancestors, whom my grandmother had once described as an unprincipled thief.
The unprepossessing building nestles up against the Aurelian Wall, to the right of the Porta del Popolo and directly beneath the Pincio. It is a treasure trove of masterpieces, containing works by Raphael, Bramante, Sansovino, and others. Outstanding are the Pinturicchio frescoes in the main chapel behind the altar, and two famously magnificent huge paintings by Caravaggio, The Conversion of St. Paul and The Crucifixion of St. Peter, in one of the side chapels. When I first walked into this church, however, shortly after my arrival in Rome, I went initially in search of my ancestor, the unprincipled cleric from Ravenna who, according to family legend, had despoiled us of our patrimony by leaving everything at his death to the Church. I found his bust mounted high up with several others in a long, narrow side corridor to the right. Cardinal Carlo Traversario, with his long beard, tall miter, and strong nose, stared coldly back at me out of his sightless, bulging eyes as if to rebuke me for my effrontery. "He stole from the poor and gave to the rich," I remember my grandmother telling me, but then, like many Romans, she was a mangiaprete, a so-called priest-eater, someone who believed that too many of the world's injustices were due to the meddling in temporal affairs by members of the clergy.
For all of my early years back in Rome, the Piazza del Popolo remains a constant, the scene of so many major and minor events. Its vastness and its curiously irregular shape contributed to its fascination. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Romans used to play at "blind cat," a form of blindman's buff in which contestants were blindfolded, whirled about a couple of times, and asked to reach the exits from the square into Via del Corso from the base of the obelisk. Few succeeded, a testimony to the deceptively irregular layout imposed on the square by a succession of architects and town planners, including Giuseppe Valadier, who later became famous for his designs in Paris.
Martin Luther is supposed to have fallen to his knees here when he first arrived in Rome, and held up his hands to heaven in thanks, though it did him little good later. The Romans themselves used the square as a promenade, for an evening drive, for carnival and other celebrations. During my time it became the site for the enormous and potentially violent rallies staged by Italy's Communist Party, then the second largest in Europe. From there, after a series of inflammatory speeches, the crowds would sometimes fan out to march through the city, under defiant revolutionary banners and shouting angry slogans. Occasionally the government's tough, truncheon-wielding security cops would break the meetings up, sending protesters fleeing into doorways and up side streets. I covered several of these events for Time, and once even found myself dragooned into participating in one by a Roman stonemason who had done some work for me and became a friend. He dragged me from the sidelines into the heart of the crowd to cheer and shout with everyone else.
Most of the time, however, the great piazza basked in the silence of history. There were very few cars then, and by nightfall none at all. Not only in the mornings but often in the evenings, after dinner, I'd meet friends back at the Café Rosati and we'd sit outdoors, chat, tell stories, and stare contentedly at the scene before us. When the automobile became dominant and pervasive in the early 1950s, overwhelming Italy's ancient towns under a sludge of vehicles, the Piazza del Popolo became a parking lot, while a honking flow of cars, motor scooters, and tourist buses inched past the café, spewing poison fumes toward its luckless outdoor patrons. The square today, however, has again been emptied of traffic and mostly returned to pedestrians, so that it's once more possible to enjoy it. "I was still afraid I might be dreaming," Goethe wrote in 1786, as he entered the city for the first time. "It was not till I had passed through the Porta del Popolo that I was certain it was true, that I really was in Rome."
Copyright © 2003 by William Murray.
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