Look up

The advice, “don’t forget to look up,” was the best tip I got before I spent a month cruising the Louvre in 2014. It changed my traveling art pilgrim’s perspective. It made my heart open and my soul expand.
It was a euphoric experience in Rome. I was awed and seduced by the glory overhead, revelations just waiting to be noticed. When artistic geniuses put forth their best effort into visual redemption, they deliver. Spare a thought for what it takes to create this work, the skill and dexterity that has to be married to the physical challenge of working upside down.
Sometimes it’s a specific element, like trompe l’oeil, that makes the magic happen.

Sometimes it’s pure pattern, color, and light.

Sometimes it all about showing off temporal power and might; the doves from the coat of arms of the Doria Pamphilj dynasty or the battle victories of the Colonna.

I am partial to the stories of gods and goddesses rollicking in sylvan glades, Hercules in action, and astrological symbols (hey, I’m a former hippie).

It’s different from works on canvas. I never warmed up to Vasari (painter and author of Lives of the Artists) until I saw his frescoed ceilings in the Vatican. It was a revelation. The stiff pomposity of his large canvas works was nowhere to be found in the gauzy-edged, joyful overhead renderings. Biblical stories are a favorite theme. I don’t know how much time the popes spent on their back, but I am sure their mistresses were grateful.

I’ve always associated the notion of heaven with gazing up whether it’s a view of blue skies, sunlight streaming in ribbons through the clouds, or a night sky strewn with stars.
We instinctively raise up that which we venerate. There’s reason for thrones and podiums and altars; to remind you that you are in the presence of something greater than yourself. There’s a reason people cram the Vatican Museums to bursting and all surge in one direction; the Sistine Chapel. Imagine, in a world lit only by fire you could look up and see light and color and beauty instead of darkness.

Mirrors and binoculars don’t work for me, but I have a few successful strategies for the ubiquitous crick-in-your-neck issue.

1. Stop, look down and to the left and right. Pause. Go back for more.
2. Take photos where permitted. Your phone on selfie mode works great! You can take excellent photos without doing a backbend.
3. Lean on a stone wall or marble pillar, arch your back, and tilt your chin up. If the wall surfaces are frescoed, don’t do this.
4. Find a pew, slide down until your neck is supported, and stare to your heart’s content.

Sometimes the painting overhead is a culmination of a space entirely given over to beauty and inspiration. Visual hope. When it’s done right, it’s full immersion, like when the Baptists go down to the river, and you are forever changed.

Rome: The Good, the Bad, the Heartbreaking.
The Heartbreaking
Look down.
I know I’ve insisted on looking up. Having your breath taken away by the extreme beauty of Italian ceilings is an experience that never gets old.
But one day I happened to look down as I opened the front doors of my apartment on Via Germanico, 96. I saw three brass squares the size of cobblestones, set slightly askew in the sidewalk.
Curious, I looked closer. A few minutes later, I felt my heart crack. A teaspoon of information was on each one; a name, three dates, two places.

Qui Abitava
Giuseppe Efrati
Nato 1880
Arrestato 16.10.1943
Deportato
Auschwitz
Assassinato 23.10.1943

I can only recognize a few words in Italian, but I understood this immediately. Arrested, deported, assassinated. I barely needed the dates to know what I was looking at. Auschwitz is synonymous with Hell in every language. In one blink, I’d seen a Holocaust memorial, powerful and painful. Here, right here, these people lived, just as I lived here now, and they were taken from here to be slaughtered.

Qui Abitava
Clara Baroccio Efrati
Nata 1891
Arrestata 18.10.1943
Deportata
Auschwitz
Morta
in luogo ignoto
in data ignoto

I had to Google Translate the ending of Clara Baroccio Efrati’s brass square

Dead
In an unknown place
On an unknown date

The third square belonged to their son.
Qui Abitava
Augusto Efrati
Nata 1916
Arrestata 16.4.1944
Deportata
Auschwitz
Morta 19.3.1945
Gross rosen

It ended with another phrase I didn’t understand; Gross rosen. Big Roses? What could that mean? Google knew. It was the center of an industrial complex and the administrative hub of a network of at least 97 subcamps. If you saw the movie Schindler’s List, it was set there.

What did the writing on the three brass squares tell me? A 63-year-old man and 52-year-old woman – husband and wife (most likely) and their 29-year-old son, who shared the name of an emperor of Rome. The couple was arrested in October 43, he first, she two days later. The young man was not captured until April 44, seven months later. I wonder, was he in hiding, or in denial? Unable to escape or unwilling to leave his home? The father died a week after deportation, the mother’s death is at a place and at a date unknown. The son survived for 11 months after his arrest.

I don’t know which fragment of information is more devasting. The two days the wife is left behind, or the day they knock at the door again? The mother’s anonymous death and unmarked grave, or the seven months the son spent in grief and dread? Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets Jan 27, 1945 but not soon enough for the son. He dies two months after that date, after eight months of forced slavery and unspeakable misery, exterminated by the Nazi regime.

I began to see these brass plaques in memoriams in front of doors in other Roman streets. They never failed to crack my heart wide open.They commemorated  Jews and patriots. The memorial for Don Pietro Pappagallo was a Resistance priest killed in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre in 1944 and whose character featured in Rossellini’s movie Open City

I learned more about the origins of these miniature memorials, called stolpersteins, via Google, Wikipedia and NPR.

“The stolperstein art project was initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, and is still ongoing. It aims at commemorating individual persons at exactly the last place of residency—or, sometimes, work—which was freely chosen by the person before he or she fell victim to Nazi terror,  euthanasia, eugenics, was deported to a concentration or extermination, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. As of 31 January 2017, over 56,000 stolperstein have been laid in 22 European countries, making the stolperstein project the world’s largest decentralized memorial.”

Rome: The Good, The Bad, The Heartbreaking.
The Bad.
Roma è schifoso. Seriously. Rome is not just dirty, it’s nasty.  It’s filthy. Dumpsters overflow with garbage, stinking puddles of ooze spreading out from the base.I don’t know why my souvenirs of Rome didn’t include Cholera. Bags of garbage are left on street corners for city pick up that may or may not happen. Seagulls, dogs, and other scavengers* rip them open and scatter the contents. I’m not bitching about graffiti or pollution. Litter is everywhere. People drop wrappers, cigarette butts, cans, bottles, and half-eaten pizza on the sidewalk and walk away. Rome’s parks are weedy, trashy and unkempt, overgrown pastures for the homeless. Don’t take my word for it. Watch this April 2017  footage of poor neglected Piazza de Vittorio. If you want to cut to the to the rubbish chase, start at 2:43.

Locals tell me it’s an intractable situation created by city employee corruption and/or the Mafia. The whole system needs to be scrapped and redesigned. Good luck with that.

In April, Rome mayor Virginia Raggi, elected on a promise to solve the garbage crisis, announced a 12-point plan to clean up the eternal city.
My favorite unintentionally hilarious point is redefining garbage as “post-usage materials.” Poof! Garbage no longer exists, so there’s no longer a crisis.
One glimmer of hope – recycling is a fundamental Roman skill. Roman builders scavenged ‘spolia’ (reusable materials) throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, the church re-purposed temples into churches and recycling is the centerpiece of Raggi’s plan.

I doubt a Keep Rome Beautiful PSA will do it, even if they made Michelangelo’s David cry.
However, in a world where smoking can successfully be banned from Italian restaurants, anything is possible. Maybe divine intervention is the way to go. Pray for a miracle. 

*rats