On Rome, by Ionut Moise

Ionut Moise es un académico rumano establecido en Inglaterra. Su campo de investigación es la Filosofía India. En ésta, su primera colaboración para El Exquisito, publicamos una nota de su viaje a Roma en el verano de 2024. Entre obeliscos y ruinas, el autor descubre mitos, muerte e inmortalidad.

Date: 9th of August, 2024. As I prepare to take off, I feel like I must debunk two important myths about Rome, both of which magnify, not minimise, the importance of this city.

The first, is the temptation to see Rome as the centre of the world, a kind of axis mundi (Milliarium Aureum), a point which all roads are measured from or split. But the experience I had by walking on foot for miles and miles in the old town is that this city is in fact more of a polycentric setting where important monuments sit at the junction of many roads, such that you can see them at the top of any road you take to reach them. There are many such points of gravity so much so that all looks like a polycentric metropolis resembling a galaxy where solar systems gather around important monuments which occupy the middle.

The sole exception from this rule is the Vatican, whose grand boulevard faces a bend of a river and a wing of a castle (Castel Sant’Angelo). So to reach the Vatican you cannot walk and approach it from your own perspective, as approaching the obelisks; you must, rather, conform to one single line, and route of thought. This is in my view a dissonance in the general architectural landscape of Rome. But this anomaly does nothing but to enhance the complexity and beauty of the universe Rome represents. After all, Rome is a conflict between unity and plurality, between difference and division, between monolithic power and democracy.

The second myth pertains to the proverb coined by Rome’s greatest poet Virgil (70-19 BC) who looks at ancient Rome as the ‘eternal city’. But what eternal city? for what you see around are only ruins now. Yet Rome is not one city, only. It is in fact two. A mortal one, which lies on the surface (everything historical you see now, ruins, obelisks, fountains and so on). And a living one underneath with a minimum of 150 kilometres of alleys of thousands of tombs that inhabit the catacombs (approximate figures). A whole living city underground with thousands of people who, since the second through the 5th century AD ‘went quiet’ from the tumult of the world on surface (mostly persecution) but hoping for an eternal dwelling and existence. This city underground is the one that the poet Virgil, perhaps without anticipating its collapse, indicated quite intuitively. Rome is not eternal in the sense of which Homer had wanted to say it about Troy. Rome is the eternal city because it shifted from glory and mono-centrism to death, transformation and polycentrism.

By embracing its death, Rome has become immortal.

Ionut Moise is a Romanian academic established in Britain. His field of research is Indian Philosophy. This is his first contribution to El Exquisito. He published this piece previously on his Facebook page.