Stories of Rome
Contrary to popular belief, encounters do not take place between people but emerge from places and things. We encounter a door in deep shadow despite midday sun; we encounter an abandoned alleyway off a busy street; we encounter ancient stone somehow preserved in hypermodernity. Things hidden, things out of place, old buildings and silhouettes projected from afar: encounters are to experience as wayward stones are to the strolling man.
What lends Rome its distinctive aura is the tempo at which one encounters, which is breakneck. A man born under Mussolini sits upon a medieval street as he smokes a Marlboro; he watches a party of youth amass under columns that saw Augustus and Paul. It is summer, which seems like the only season Rome has, so it is bright, but the shade under which he rests is pitch. Churches are everywhere in the city, which means at the hour it seems the whole world is ringing.
And it’s all perfectly natural here, even graceful. The Italians themselves hardly notice. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the casual elegance known as sprezzatura was coined in Italy. For how else could one traverse the low-yield shocks that make up Rome?
As we can only cherish dreams upon waking, so are we lucky to know Rome only in its ruin.
No one has ever seen the entirety of Rome: every wall seems to shift with the sunlight.
Perhaps only in Italy are the elderly more reliably stylish than the young.
Everything seems to get displaced by shadows in a sort of natural circus.
You can feel yourself get lost even when standing still.
“Experience is what we get when looking for something else”— Federico Fellini
What left can be said of Rome—that inheritance of peoples so mythic and lost to time that one nearly walks its streets with a phantom sense not unlike when one encounters the childhood trinket, indelibly familiar but impossible to recall—perhaps only that when we look into Rome’s marbled and ruined faces of every kind and, as though preordained, we encounter our facsimiles in odd self-recognition, the ineluctable question is raised: are we encountering ourselves twice-over, or once-removed?
A photo story by Fulani S. Hart
Photographer Fulani S. Hart
Copy written by Kyle