Life is Short and We're Dumb

Maybe it was inevitable that I would spend some time thinking about faith while living in Rome. My wife, Martha, and I moved here for three months for no reason other than we wanted to. Our kids are in college, we’re both unemployed, and we wanted to travel a bit while we’re still young enough and healthy enough to make financially stupid decisions - no, we can’t afford it – but life is short and we’re dumb.

Our little apartment is a short walk from St. Peter’s Basilica, right in the heart of the Vatican. Actually, I suppose it is the heart of the Vatican. At 21,000 square meters, it’s the largest church in the world. The Pope hangs out there. They make Popes there. Right around the corner is another church. Down the street, another. In fact, in the five minutes it takes me to walk over there, I probably pass half a dozen churches, which works out to about a church per minute. One could certainly swing a dead cat without hitting a church in Rome, but why would you want to? Not that you couldn’t find a dead cat here. In Rome, death looms.

In some ways, Rome feels like the world’s most beautiful necropolis. The ruins are everywhere, often well-preserved, but sometimes just the plinth of a column against the side of an unremarkable apartment building. People live among their history in a direct and visceral way. The Coliseum is right there, barely noticed by the locals as they drive to work in the morning. Plundered obelisks from the time of Cleopatra decorate the piazzas. You can walk the same streets as Julius Caesar, visit his tomb, then get some gelato.

I was unprepared for the overwhelming sense of living history that smacked me in the face when I actually experienced it. James Joyce, twenty-four years old and feeling a little cynical, wrote “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.” There’s some truth to that statement, but not much.

(James Joyce, kind of a dick)

For all of its death, Rome is still very much alive. There’s people everywhere doing all manner of peoply things: drinking, flirting, screaming, sighing on park benches, shopping for lightbulbs. Yesterday I saw a couple of cute young priests riding electric scooters. Life and death. And it’s lovely.

Rome is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen. I don’t just mean the pretty parts gussied up for tourists. Walk down almost any street and you’ll find something – a door, a wall, a public water fountain carrying water from the same aqueducts built two thousand years ago. The colors are lush peaches and golds and salmon. Even the clouds have a distinctly Italian look about them, puffed up like the crust of a Neapolitan pizza pie. I haven’t traveled that much but I’ve seen every corner of the United States and no American city compares. Maybe Milwaukee.

And, of course it’s a city of faith. I don’t just mean Catholic faith, although Catholicism is obviously the dominant religion. In fact, one of the ironies of Rome is that all of those churches I mentioned are often empty. Italian Catholicism has become, in some ways, like American Judaism, more often than not a cultural identifier as opposed to an active religious practice. The faith here, I think, is more sensual than religious. The faith of food, tradition, and community. On Sunday afternoons, it’s common to see three generations eating together at the local trattoria. They didn’t come from church; they came for polpette and tiramisu. They came to be together as a family. Here, the generations are linked, the living generations and the dead.

(For real, though, look at these fluffy fucking clouds.)

I live in Savannah, Georgia. Every night in Savannah, groups of tourists gather in the city squares for ghost tours. On some nights, you might pass five or six of these tours being escorted around town by guides often dressed in some corny steampunk version of early American garb. It’s a big thing there because Savannah is, apparently, “the most haunted city in America.” It’s harmless, often drunken, fun. But what strikes me as funny about that now is that there don’t seem to be any ghost tours in Rome.

That’s weird, right?

The city of Caligula and Nero has no ghost tours? The city of gladiators. A city of rebellions, invasions, fires and plagues, slaves marched down city streets from every corner of the known world. With all the suffering this city has endured over the centuries, you’d think there’d be at least a few good hauntings, right? Some toga-wearing specter drinking from a wine bag somewhere. Nope. No ghost tours. Why not? I wonder if the reason is simply that Romans don’t need to look for their ghosts. They live with them. They’ve lived with them for thousands of years. The people here have placed their faith in ghosts, and, in turn, the ghosts have placed their faith in them.