Coming back to the Forum with fresh eyes, I realized that part of what bothered me about Rome is the huge disorder. It's not so much the way the monuments pile upon monuments, churches with priceless artworks elbowing their way in among all the other churches with equally priceless artworks.
It's how careless, and cluttered, it feels. Rome is full of these old marble pedestals, pieces of columns, toppled capitals. And every single one of them is just left where it fell, as though in two thousand years no one could be bothered to pick them up and straighten them out.
If there are enough of them, the Romans simply put a fence around them, but even in the Forum, where every bit of marble is presumably historically valuable, there's very little effort made to order or preserve any of it.
Anyone who's tired, or needs to read a map, just plops down on the nearest piece of marble, something that would be unthinkable anywhere else.
No comments:
Post a Comment