With Green Shutters (5)

'The cracks and creases enchant me. On the outside, I see a number 20. It dribbles down, lightning slits in the fortress wall. Number 20, enter here. Number 20, dribbles here. Number 20, breaks here. Number 20: it grows here.
Here, the 20 lay their roots in stone.'
The quietest cloister in Rome: Santi Quattro Coronati. mezzogiorno di Mer, 5 Sept. Scabbia.


Yes, my most beautiful sights of Italy are the walls: certain walls; most walls. They are those most colorful walls, yet not necessarily the brightest; sometimes a grey wall can hold more visual flare than the freshly painted orange mockery next door. The color of the walls grows with time - they are aged like the wine drunk inside of them, like the generations that move slowly through their space. There will be a patch of dark metal color, then one so rained upon it appears as clear pewter. The patchwork pattern on these walls reflects the clouds, shifting steadily overhead as these erected skies hold up a slow maturation of the events on the ground.

If a beer bottle is hastily chucked over a Roman shoulder and smashes into the wall, it does not immediately crumble to the horizontal plane. The wall shows first its pain with a dents, a rough edged, monotone hole. As the drunken nights pass, the edges wear, they leak downwards and stagger the wall beneath with painless lines. The hole itself collects rain, and drops that down too.


These walls serve as intermediaries between the sky that makes Rome - Makes the water of Rome and the fruit of Rome and the light of Rome and the sometimes sooty breath of Rome: makes Rome - and the land of Rome itself. Just as the people change the products of the rain with their cultural crops and their flooded roads, so too do the walls mediate the sky as it enters the people enlightened by it.

Here in Rome, we live in layers. It is easiest to show one, to be modern, simple minded towards la festa. And yet, of course there are other layers: There is the ancient we walk through, there is the solitary rooms we sleep in, there is the flood of others from around the Mediterranean, from around the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific. And while as travelers it may be difficult to see those layers all at once, the shock of their presence forming a wall by its own accord, the Romans see it. Not all at once of course, but they see many layers, and I have proof! Have you seen a Sicilian scream about a bus? Have you seen a leather vendor grumble away a carelessly rich tourist? Have you seen the sexy stare of a middle-aged, woman tightly bound by her clothing? The Romans are dramatic. They are not one emotion, but a collision of emotions at once. They are open, releasing their experiences, soaking in the new ones that, however modern, are tainted with the ancient. Rome is not botox - it is alive with wrinkles on its face, with movement and smiles and scowls about the littlest of things.

In that cracked grey stone, we find the most vibrant color, vibrant because it holds flavor, it holds old scent, and fresh tears. These walls have watched for a long time, these colorful walls. And the walls that are yet to be colorful, the walls of a dull new orange, eventually they will bellow in frustration and laughter as walls of the city of Rome.