Roman Interiors

I walk, I wander
To penetrate the hidden:
Champollion of platitudes
In the Egyptian room of the Palazzo Massimo,
Amid crocodile pharaohs, sphinxes without riddles,
My scarab beetle mind rolling dungballs with delight,
Over hieroglyphic desert horizons,
While the secret tunnels and chambers
Of palm trees and pyramids
Initiate me into death;

Mine, too, the Casino di Pio IV in the Vatican gardens:
Sumptuous pavilions, a pope’s retreat,
A place to pace out
Rosaries of thoughts and ideas,
And dally with imaginary nymphs.
Never doubt the ringed hand’s machinations
And the devilish powers beneath a cardinal’s hat!

Door handles in the form of aeroplane wings,
Propeller-style ceiling lights,
And astronomical murals:
This is the Palazzo Aeronautica.
The basement wall is frescoed
With aviators’ paradise,
Fallen Fascist heroes seated amid the clouds,
Playing chess and drinking capuccino.

The Loggia in the Villa Madama:
Raphael’s luminosity
From wandering the ruins of the Domus Aurea,
Memories and visions commingled,
To illuminate the occult day.
The European man am I,
Anxious and audacious,
Taking whatever I can get.

There was a moment, whimsical and free,
Just before the days of war and dogma,
With the trains departing for the coast
From here, the Stazione di Porta San Paolo:
These walls bright with crabs and scallop shells,
Mermaids and sea beasts cavorting...
Trains that pulled away and never returned,
Disappearing into a permanent vacation,
Children building sandcastles
On the shore of a wishful smile.

I pace the walls
In the Museo Capitolino:
Sixty-six Roman emperors’ busts,
Arranged in chronological order,
The empire entire
Like a stamp collection.
Between creation and curation,
The world subsists.

In the Albergo degli Ambasciatori
The frescoes on the walls of the salone,
Veronesian and Tiepolesque,
The beau monde of the nineteen twenties,
Illuminated from below
By theatrical footlights,
And lo, a likeness among the faces
Of Mussolini’s mistress, Margherita Sarfatti,
An innocent faux pas by the painter,
That caused the angry duce
To order the picture draped and hidden.

The walls of the great swimming pool
In the Foro Italico
Boast titanic mosaics
Of virile sportsmen baring their bodies
In the performance of stupendous sporting feats,
Amid mythical sea monsters
And likeminded Greek heroes.
But what possessed Mussolini
To allow in his personal gymnasium,
A Cubist floor mosaic,
He,who so detested the avant-garde?

In the Convento di Santa Trinità dei Monti,
The anamorphic fresco in a passageway,
Painted in acute perspective:
From either end, Saint Francesco di Paola is clear to see,
But when you confront the work directly,
The phantom vanishes from sight,
Replaced by a mountainous Calabrian landscape
Stippled with miniature figures,
Enacting scenes from the saint’s life.
In the Stanza delle Rovine, by Clérisseau,
I am inside a trompe l’oeil
Of an ancient Roman chamber,
With exposed timbers, disintegrating masonry
And holes in the walls and ceiling
Providing views of the sky and an imaginary landscape;
This once served as a bedchamber,
Commissioned by a scientist-monk,
And contained a suite of furniture
In the form of architectural ruins.

In the church of Santa Maria Antiqua
I survey eighth-century frescoes,
Executed by artists from Constantinople
Who had fled to Rome in troubled times
Of iconoclasm in their native city;
Here, in the west they carried on
Their eastern tradition, indomitable
In the faith and love of images.

The Villa Berlingieri,:
All the grandiose affluence and optimism
Of the years just before the Great War,
Self-besotted, self-doomed;
Weird gilt and marble glister
Irradiates you, luxury out of control,
Surfeit of detail and dazzle,
Just about to tip into apocalyse.

In the Palazzo del Quirinale
The elliptical spiral staircase with coupled Doric columns
By Mascherino:
Looking down is vertiginous,
Down through repeated ovals, twisting the eye,
Whorling the sense through whirlpools,
Willing this to be infinite,
Exalted and sickened,
Down to the egg of light far below,
The white eye,
The empty mirror.