“An institution on the history and life of the city is missing”. Andrea Carandini is part of the debate on the capital’s museum heritage, relaunched by Carlo Calenda
Talking about culture in Rome, after so much darkness, is surprising. A hard fate was for a city to pass from the capital of an ancient civilization and empire, to the small state of the Church, to the capital of a newly born nation. Rome cannot be transformed into a capital of a state formed in the Middle Ages, which is the fate of London and Paris. You can’t perform too many functions one after the other: only sensational actors are allowed to play different parts in comedy. The last part supported – as the capital – is the one that the city has held up less well. I believe that Rome interests the planet above all as the epicenter of Western civilization from the eighth century BC to the seventeenth (when it gravitated to the cities of beyond the Alps) and as the fulcrum of Catholic Christianity in which Peter and Paul were martyred by Nero.
If Rome has not managed to represent Italy well, it is because for too many centuries it has been the center of gravity of opposing universalisms, yet the son of each other, for which the capital dress of a state born in the nineteenth century – the liberal and bourgeois century – fit her tight. In fact in Rome an industrial bourgeoisie was the exception among the populace, priests, bureaucrats, aristocrats and generone. But the embers of a universal cultural vocation in Rome are still burning and would lie in telling the Globe how Western civilization was born and developed for two and a half millennia, now part of the history of the world.
Not even God is able to rewrite history. It is therefore not a question of somehow refurbishing a Louvre museum in Rome, merging museums different from the distinguished tradition, between the Renaissance and the unification of Italy, certainly improved in terms of enhancement and management, but not movable, dismembered or mixed. Italy had the original weakness of recognizing in Rome, in addition to the State superintendencies, the superintendency of the Municipality – of papal origin – for which the monumental heritage of the city was divided (the temple of Rome and Venus, with two cells, was split, so the Forum of Caesar from the Roman one, etc.), yet it would be too difficult to overturn such nonsense.
In this regard, Minister Dario Franceschini and Mayor Ignazio Marino established in 2014 a commission that should have proposed an organism to jointly manage the monumental and museum heritage of the city, a dream sent up in smoke by the current mayor Virginia Raggi and an improvised councilor, but the project must be resumed as soon as possible, recomposing the Colosseum state park with the municipal one of the Imperial Forums (disappointing in the last layout for wanting to show everything, including the sixteenth-century cellars, while it is the temple of Trajan, denied for too long, which should be investigated under the Province, to be connected to theAthenaeum found in Piazza Venezia). The Roman cultural heritage – state, municipal, Church and private – must therefore above all be concerted – overcoming the various potentates to serve the general interest – and integrated with what is missing: the recomposition of urban contexts, region by region, period for period, so that the history of the city becomes seriously and easily understandable to all. How I would like to see life in a museum as described by Cicero and Pediment in Rome, Saint-Simon and Balzac in France, Boswell and Johnson in Great Britain, before the hegemony ofart for art!
Bella was this romantic idea of art, except that legions of statues and sequelae of paintings never come to tell a city with its institutions, architecture, furnishings, forms and means of life: the human comedy! A historical museum of Rome, at least ancient and early medieval, but then also late medieval and modern (up to the plan by Giovan Battista Nolli who first returned to the precision of urbis shape of Septimius Severus after a millennium and a half) is completely missing in Rome as elsewhere in Italy. It was thought of placing it in a building between Santa Maria in Cosmedin and the Circus Maximus: an excellent idea by Walter Veltroni, which I supported a lot, went up in smoke. Then Ernesto Galli della Loggia and I imagined, in this newspaper, a museum of the history of Italy, similar to that of the history of Germany wanted by Helmut Kohl in Berlin, to be placed in the Quirinal palace, with boundless and vast rooms and cellars underused: another idea dropped and instead to be rescued.
In the meantime, the idea of the museum of the history of Rome has been changing. It is no longer a question of accumulating and recombining beautiful objects taken from other museums, but of making full use of information technology and multimedia, the only ones capable of reviving urban and rural landscapes of the past, with few insertions of significant objects, mainly taken from deposits ( like the fragments of the urbis shape Severiana!). The mayoral candidate Carlo Calenda did well to take up this idea, imagining it now in the Town Hall, were it not for the fact that he inserted it in an anti-historical project, which would dissolve the Capitoline and Conservatory Museums just as he proposes to save lost history of the city. With collectible materials, useful for the history of ancient art, we do not arrive at a museum of the sacred, political and private life of the city.
Bravo is Roberto Gualtieri in his convincing program. He wants to revive the city museum next to the Circus Maximus (former Pantanella pasta factory), combining it with that of Roman civilization and equipping it with a center to update knowledge about Rome not by points but by whole: the discoveries are continuous but must be recomposed, possibly reconnecting Rome in the suburbs and Lazio: fascinating and very forgotten. The center of a landscape and cultural heritage “polyclinic”, imagined by Gualtieri, fits perfectly into it: an integrated structure of superintendencies, parks, museums, universities and third sector for competent mission. Regarding the latter, the mayor Marino had asked the FAI to manage the Teatro di Marcello: the Fund had raised seven million, then returned to the sponsor due to the paralyzing listlessness of the municipal Superintendency (which then did nothing for that place); something similar also happened for the villa of Maxentius. However, there is no shortage of other locations in Rome to be restored to life, such as Villa Rivaldi, located on top of Mount Velia, where King Tullo Ostilio and the urban prefects of ancient Rome lived. But the resistance of antiques for antiques and art for art are not to be underestimated. Archeology, the real one, wants something else:holon, that is, the whole.
It should be added that the history of Rome could also be told at the Colosseum, if from the arena reconstructed in wood – to respect the landscape painting preceding the recent earthworks of the underground scene – a screen could arise in the evening on which to recall the history of the city in front of visitors seated on cushions at the edge of the floor itself.
Dreams? No, hope for a future worthy of the legacy.
August 23, 2021 (change August 23, 2021 | 21:12)
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