City of Contradictions

Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian director, screen writer, essayist, poet, critic and novelist, lamented: “What is Rome? Where is the real Rome? Where does it begin and where does it end? Rome is surely the most beautiful city in Italy, if not the world. But it is also the most ugly, the most welcoming, the most dramatic, the richest, the most wretched … The contradictions of Rome are difficult to transcend because they are contradictions of an existential order. Rather than traditional contradictions, between wealth and misery, happiness and horror, they are part of a magma, a chaos.”

Ah, Roma. A city of romance, majestic buildings, high fashion. A perfect brochure description of a beautiful modern city blended in with its own rich history. Once you get here though, you begin to notice that some things don’t quite line up with the brochures.

On the building next to a beautiful Medieval church some Italian youth has scrawled a rather frank message regarding a blunt word coupled with the name of a certain political leader. A woman in Gucci snakeskin stilettos clomps resolutely past a woman with one leg who holds out an empty cup and a sign that says “grazie.” Smartly dressed policemen stand about with a sort of sharp, useless air about them, but then when there is a riot in the Campo de Fiori, they are nowhere to be found. One must walk past at least one beggar dressed in rags to get into each church, all of which are covered in enough rich gilding to get thirty beggars off the streets. On a Sunday, it is possible to find both a one euro leather jacket at Porta Portese and a tiny five thousand euro clutch purse at Prada. There are large concentrations of nuns and monks wandering around near the Pantheon, all very pious looking in their humble robes, but one only need turn a corner to realize that they are all there to shop on the street that sells glitzy, designer nun-and-monk-wear. Turn on the TV and there are American movies, soap operas, TV series and sitcoms dubbed in Italian, commercials involving American products, American music videos playing nonstop, and yet walk around the city in typical American attire (i.e. white tennis shoes and a Columbia jacket) and get hissed at by an Italian who is more into American TV than you are. Everyone who lives in Roma takes the bus or drives a tiny, economical car or motorbike, and yet there is nowhere in existence to recycle paper or bottles or cans. All Italians care very much about their bodies and you will rarely see an overweight or unhealthy looking one, but absolutely everyone smokes cigarette after cigarette. Chaos indeed.

To separate the divergent bits of Roma from each other would be like trying to separate dirt and the dust of crushed lapis lazuli. Impossible, and in the end, pointless. The filth is made all the more beautiful for the addition of the precious stone and the contrast of the blue against the dark brown makes the lapis all the more stunning. I would say the “real Rome” is not difficult to find, for the real Rome is both the beauty and the ugliness of her streets and buildings and people. The real Rome is that chaos.