Rome
It’s been eight months…yes eight…since the return of my first trip to Italy and for that matter Europe. I think a visit actually counts when you get to step out of an airport. Perhaps I haven’t known where to start. I mean it’s hard to process millenniums of history thrown at you in just a few short days.
My sister and I met in her hometown of Caselle, outside of Turino, and then traveled together to Rome to attend a conference together.
From the photographs that I came back with…it’s not hard to guess what impressed me most about this first trip to Italy…it was all about the architecture. I walked the streets of Rome with a craned neck looking upwards. The art of the architecture. Somehow it all seemed so familiar and yet it wasn’t. What I imagined from looking at other peoples photographs of this famous city, was different from what I actually saw first hand.
I didn’t grow up in a place with thousands of years of history preserved in etched and carved stone. The attention to detail in creating something that’s supposed to be practical and also making it beautiful was what I admired the most. Where has our craftsmanship gone? Has the art of creating something from raw materials with just a few tools been left to the ages of the past?
Even though I know the city to have a history of indulgence and cruelty, its ingenuity is impressive. Rome was like walking through a showcase of exhibits…a museum around every corner…a city dedicated to art. The windows, doors…doorsteps. The statues whose eyes bored into you as you walked past. It felt like one artist put up an art piece and around the next corner some other artist decided to show the first one up with their own piece. Each corner was competing in some grand festival of art. I wonder if they fought over the real estate. I don’t know enough of the history to know…but I can only imagine.
Church after church…one on every block of every long street. Creating beauty as acts of worship is what gets me every time. Do we sit long enough to soak up the wonder of the Creator…who created so that we could create as He does in His image? I ask of myself, where is the discipline of showing up every day to pay attention to the small details? Is this something we have forgotten? Would we fight or preoccupy ourselves with the petty disturbances that threaten to disturb our comfort zones if we were instead occupied with the Creator and creating for him? Perhaps its these details that get sucked up in monotony. I will venture to say that the perseverance of the monotonous is where the beauty awakens. The discipline of showing up day after day is how these creators created…over lifetimes.
The people I took pictures of were different than what I normally study…they were still, of stone, or from paint on canvas….lifeless but certainly lifelike and still able to draw emotion or stir up feeling. In other moments I felt like all this inspiring beauty was something gone cold…buildings can inspire, impress, but unless they are filled with life…relationships that relate, learn from, reflect…its a grand, colossal void. This city drew out impressive and mixed emotions from me. I’m still struggling to elaborate all these emotions with words.
I know it would take multiple visits to this place to get the full picture…experience the full scope of life that surely happens in Rome….to try to photograph the people…the living, breathing people of Rome that give the city its warmth.
I did leave wondering, if given the opportunity, would I, could I jump into the restoration workshops to begin to learn the crafts of old? It made me long for a second awakening and renaissance. How does this begin in my corner of the world in my own little home?
