Notes

Thirteen years.

The perception of periods of time changes according to the stage of life. For an elderly person, thirteen years refer to a recent stage, whose events unfold even in the present, analogous to a strangely longer “yesterday”; for a teenager, it represents an entire life, a dark period before which everyday life belonged to the “old”.

I have lost track of what thirteen years were. They appear to me as a nostalgic blur, of a visible passion, but reduced to bright dots amid barely discernible colors, like an impressionist painting covered by a translucent veil.

I know that, while they were passing, the days weighed down painfully; when I stepped there, thirteen years were finally becoming clear and gaining meaning. Or, as Drummond described it much better, “the machine of the world opened up for those who were already avoiding breaking it and who regretted just thinking about it.”

Only God creates. The Hebrew “bara” is not synonymous with the Latin “creare” because in this dimension, substance is not generated from nothing. Nothing we use, do, are, or consider habitual in our everyday lives was actually created by us. We inherited some customs from family members, some indispensable gadgets we bought from inventors who are now millionaires… and other elements we took from ancient civilizations that we don’t even remember outside of our History classes for the National High School Exam.

Look: this language that I write and in which you read me came from the Romans. Someone in your immediate family certainly has a Roman name. The judicial system that crosses your mind every time a new scandal appears on your Instagram timeline is Roman in origin. The cement in the walls of your house is Roman. The plumbing system that brings you water — the kind you use to make a protein shake while you’re getting in shape — is Roman in origin. The churches you have always seen scattered throughout the streets of your city, where you may have been baptized by an uncle as a baby and never set foot again, are “normal” because the Roman world once welcomed and nurtured them. Many things we take for granted are here because Rome determined that they would be.

For thirteen years I had been burning with the need to understand what it would be like to set foot on this soil. Thirteen years begging for a brief glimpse of the buildings that were planned, long before the era of sprints and lineup calls, to be eternal. Thirteen years yearning for touching, on any mysterious day, the home of those who left behind in civilization not a sterile trail of exotic productions that have already died, but their very foundation. Thirteen years longing to see up close the shadows not of ancient ghosts speaking dead languages ​​and worshiping fallen gods, but the shadows of ourselves, who have walked there for much more than 2,000 years.

Rome was not only the guiding principle of the reality we built, but also of my own life. “Will I die before I see Rome? Will there still be Rome when I can travel? When I start working I need to save money to go to Rome. This, this and that I will only do in life after I go to Rome.”

I was a child dreaming. I knew it would happen, but I had no idea, as I really could not have, of who I would be when I finally left, and of what life I would have that would allow me to know it. I was a child dreaming; I became an adult with half a dozen certainties. Squeezed between them is the one that Rome is greater than words themselves, than the language that I can use to describe it, than the miserable human being that I am. We come and go; Rome stays. The last 24 centuries bear witness to this.

I thought a lot about the conclusions I would probably reach when I finally traveled. Wanting to escape common sense, I learned their language and from a young age I drank directly from the source: talking to Romans, watching Roman media, listening to Roman music, reading Roman authors. I thought that the trip would serve to confirm what I observed in them. I collected a few, scarce words that I imagined would be enough to explain what I would see. Nonsense. Rome cannot be explained; Rome is seen, like the spectacle that it is; it is lived, like the soul that it truly has. In the climate, in the disorganization, in the unique aromas, in the stamped faces, in the complete shrug that the Grande Bellezza offers you when you try to confess an old love. “Another admirer? Go to the end of the line, cara mia.” And off she goes, following her predictably unpredictable path; ethereal, irresistible.

CAPVT MVNDI, as the Romans coined it and as we still read today everywhere and in every context in the city: we are, in fact, talking about the head of our world, preserved, under lock and key, in the machine mentioned by Drummond. Until the end of our history on Earth, my decades-long passion will no longer count, and I will be one of the poor souls passively observing its complete opening by the One who is the only one who can, in fact, understand it and reveal it to us, mere passers-by of the society that Mamma Roma founded.