Ferdinand Addis, The Eternal City: A History of Rome (2018)
22 dramatic chapters in the life of a city, and a civilization, you may already be thinking about every day
"Can't overstate how much everyone must go see La grande bellezza," Ferdinand Addis tweeted in September of 2013. "I want to spend the rest of my life staring at Toni Servillo's forehead." At that time, he was most widely known — to the extent that he was known to the public at all — as Ferdie Addis, author of books like Opening Pandora's Box: Phrases We Borrowed From the Classics and the Stories Behind Them and I Have a Dream: The Speeches that Changed History (with Amen to That!: The Amazing Way the Bible Influences Our Everyday Language soon to be published). Though you wouldn't necessarily visit the bookstore in search of these slim volumes, you might buy one on impulse, perhaps as a gift, upon spotting it beside the checkout counter. Whatever their raison d'être, these publications put Addis in the position be offered a contact to write a history of Rome, structured out of discontinuous episodes involving famed personages and high drama for maximum popular appeal.
In the event, he didn't write that book. Or rather, that book wasn't written by Ferdie Addis, specialist in breezily explanatory collections of notable facts and quotable quotes rapidly produced for, and consumed at the same speed by, the British market. To his history of Rome Addis bought the dignity of his non-truncated given name, as well as that of a non-truncated research and writing process, which ultimately took something like seven times the yearlong period originally specified by the contract. The resulting book was convincing enough to be marketable abroad as well. When it came time to sell it in the United States, as The Eternal City: A History of Rome, Simon & Schuster insisted on calling it the work of a "master historian." Addis himself protested against that description, as he tells it in one podcast interview, perhaps because of his relative youth and inexperience, at least by the standards of the Roman history field. Or perhaps it had to do with his not being an academic: an admirable choice, to my non-academic mind, as is his use of BC and AD for dates instead of the institutionally fashionable BCE and CE.
"This book is, above all, about the ways humans have located themselves within history," Addis writes. "It is not an academic book, nor is it concerned with history as a quasi-scientific discipline. It makes no claim to abstraction, or impersonal authority. It might question the idea that any era could be 'common' to all. This is a book about people, and their experiences and prejudices and beliefs, the myths to which people have clung." Indeed, most of its chronologically ordered 22 chapters — each conveying, in keeping with the spirit of the project as the publisher originally conceived it, a clearly distinct slice of history — center on one person in particular: Ovid, Nero, Petrarch, Michelangelo, and Mussolini, to name a few of the most recognizable. The very first deals with Romulus and Remus, the mythical twins said to have founded the city of Rome after being nursed by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber (permanently fixed in my mind as a pixelated image, thanks to childhood hours spent playing the PC game Centurion: Defender of Rome); the last, with Federico Fellini and his film La Dolce Vita, the Rome movie of the twentieth century in the same manner that, in La grande bellezza (known in English as The Great Beauty), Paolo Sorrentino made the Rome movie of the twenty-first.
For all his appreciation of Toni Servillo's forehead, Addis has said that The Eternal City gave him the chance to get up to speed on Italian cinema, about which he'd previously known little. Whether inspired by that research or not, he seems to have developed a cinematic writing style, at least in the present-tense establishing sections that open each chapter in medias res. "A summer night," begins one such passage set in 64 AD. "Down by the foot of the Caelian hill, the darkness hangs thick in the alleyways. Sounds of a city asleep: a muffled snore; the whine of a mosquito. High overhead, a narrow crack of pale sky, framed by the black outlines of looming apartment blocks." It emerges, a few paragraphs later, that "this night something is different. There is a sudden wind blowing from the Circus, acrid and hot. And now, rounding a corner, comes sound, unexpected, of shouts, and a sick orange glow lights up the graffiti on the plaster walls even though it is long before dawn, and now there are men running out of an alley with leather buckets from the cistern and pointing and clutching absurd sponges although it is already becoming clear that the moment for sponges and buckets has passed. And somewhere, in an apartment high above, a baby has woken up and is crying, and so he should be, because Rome is burning."
There are readers literal-minded enough to ask how Addis could know that just such a scene took place, and perhaps The Eternal City is not the book for them. Much of its text deals with not just what did happen — according, at least, to the best available scholarly available — but what probably happened, or what must surely have happened. The texture is that of popular history, as is the lack of prerequisites for enjoyment: the book will satisfy those who may not have read Gibbon, but nevertheless have been idly curious about whether Nero was really fiddling while Rome burned (he did fancy himself a troubadour, though his weapon of choice was the lyre), whether spectators at the Colosseum actually decided the fate of gladiators by giving the thumbs-down (it was probably a thumbs-up), or whether Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel lying flat on scaffolding (he would've been standing). At the same time, nothing in it sounds dumbed down, and readers more than casually familiar with ancient Rome will also find themselves learning new things, not least about relatively obscure figures like the teenage emperor Elagabalus, who seems to have spent his brief reign in the early third century arranging both public worship of his preferred Arab sun god and private encounters with only the best-endowed of the empire’s gladiators.
Elagabalus also appears in Gibbon, described in a manner that could hardly have improved his image, but he looms somewhat larger over Addis' much shorter book, which devotes a greater proportion of its attention to matters visceral, from sexual scandal both aristocratic and plebeian to grisly scenes of battle and torture. This is all good fun, of course, and I now feel the temptation to step into the even more lurid realm of Steven Saylor's first century-set Roma Sub Rosa detective thrillers, the kind of literature-adjacent reading material much enriched by subject-area knowledge. The Eternal City could set any non-specialist on the road to such an understanding of Roman civilization, which feels like the book's real subject over the first third or even half of its length. Indeed, for a while there, I wondered whether it would qualify as a Book on Cities at all, despite most of the history it recounts taking place within Rome's walls. But then, civilization and city are never separate, not in general, and especially not in the case of ancient Rome. At the root of the very word civilization is the Latin civitas, after all, and even in its low eras — having been sacked yet again, say, or surpassed in wealth and population by the likes of Bologna and Genoa, to say nothing of Milan and Florence — Rome continued, in Addis' telling, to stand in a more permanent way for the entity that wouldn't yet have been considered Italy.
Much of Rome's outsized role in its cultural context owes to the presence of the Vatican, of course, but the city had already amassed a formidable weight of history well before the rise of Christianity. Even before he became the first emperor of Rome to profess that religion, Constantine could march through the city and pass countless "achievements of Rome’s glorious dead. There was the mausoleum of Augustus. Further away, on the river’s right bank, the Mausoleum of Hadrian. Down the road was Aurelian’s temple of Sol Invictus and the great concrete dome of the Pantheon." It's fairly common to hear the built environment of any reasonably mature city described as a palimpsest, and much more common to hear it about Rome. "For nearly three thousand years, Rome's rulers have been rewriting the city to their own purposes," Addis writes. "Nero built a Golden House; Titus obliterated it with his Colosseum. Constantine built a basilica over the burial ground of his defeated enemies. Colonna barons quarried ancient monuments for their fortified towers. Sixteenth-century popes hid medieval churches behind baroque façades. Nineteenth-century nationalists raised their great Altar of the Fatherland on the ancient and sacred ground of the Capitoline Hill." The palimpsest metaphor works so well not just because of its air of antiquity, but also because none of these builders, however power-mad, could ever fully overwrote the Eternal City as they'd found it.
The surrounding physical presence of centuries, even millennia, tends to impress Americans traveling in most any European capital (as it tends to be a reliable source of feelings of superiority, justified or otherwise, for Europeans themselves). To borrow a concept from Malcolm Harris, who memorably describes California as "America's America," Rome is in that sense Europe's Europe, a role much reinforced by its culminating destination of the "Grand Tour" embarked upon by aristocrats coming of age in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Gibbon did it more than once.) Having long been fascinated by that tradition, I was pleased to see Addis discuss it in his chapter on nineteenth-century Romantics like Byron and Shelley. By their day, the Grand Tour was already not what it used to be; soon the railways would come, as would the "lawyers and brokers and manufacturers, shuffling round the sights, clutching tight their Murray Guides and their plump children." Mark Twain would later get a great deal of comedic mileage out of the Americans who succeeded them, though I do wonder whether he could manage to derive much humor from the phone-brandishing twenty-first century tourists who, as Addis sees them, "perch in flocks around the Trevi fountain and up and down the Spanish Steps, queue to go round the weedkiller-bleached wreckage of the Colosseum," and, in the Sistine Chapel, "gather like souls in limbo, peering upward for salvation while the papal security guards intone their hopeless litany: silence please; no photo; no photo."
Feelings of preemptive revulsion toward even the mental picture of such experiences have done their part to keep me from having set foot in Rome, or indeed Italy — so far, at least. I did begin casually studying the Italian language a few years ago, inspired primarily by an Italian cinema binge beginning with Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta (which Addis calls "perhaps the greatest dramatic expression of Italy's wartime sacrifice") and ending with yet another viewing of La grande bellezza. Reason to intensify my learning came along last spring, when my sister-in-law married a Canadian-born son of Sicilian immigrants; the wedding, I figured, would be a prime opportunity to get in some conversation practice (not that I was prepared to hear, let alone speak, the Sicilian dialect). For their honeymoon, they spent a week or so in Italy on a multi-city package trip scheduled at what I would call a breakneck pace, which required them to go to the Colosseum practically straight from the airport. What they saw was no doubt a far cry from how it would have looked on a Grand Tour, covered in wild vegetation and, ideally, illuminated by moonlight alone. Still, I'm sure the ruins of that ancient arena (which Toni Servillo's Jep Gambardella could see from his hammock) will play as central a role in my own first trip to Rome as it did in my reading of The Eternal City: the Colosseum was the point from which I looked up the walking route to every major landmark Addis mentions.
In The Eternal City’s epilogue, Addis briefly tells of his own first trip to Rome, made with a couple of friends at the age of eighteen. "We came by cargo ship from Valencia, had no money at all, no idea of anything," he writes. "That was before smartphones and data roaming, so we just wandered, three shambling boys in too-big jeans; got lost; ended up sharing two cellophane-wrapped panini on a grass verge by a traffic intersection somewhere near the Baths of Caracalla." Yet he couldn't have been quite as intellectually unprepared as he makes himself sound. In one of the aforementioned interviews, he mentions having done Latin and Greek at school; though we're of the same generation, those languages weren't even an option where I went, let alone a requirement. (I've come to believe that American schools were wrong to phase them out, and indeed to de-emphasize subjects involving large amounts of rote memorization in general.) Though my own interest in the classical world arose much later, thanks in large part to the Roman Stoic figureheads, Seneca the Younger and Marcus Aurelius, it eventually developed to the point that, when I got in my new brother-in-law's car and heard its stereo resume playing a Great Courses series on the history of the Roman Empire, I knew we'd get along just fine.
Maybe that's not terribly surprising, given that men — at least as the meme from a couple years ago had it — think about the Roman Empire every day. It surprised my wife to hear that, and even more so to hear, when she asked me, that I myself am no exception. In my defense, I have to write fairly often about matters to do with not just the Empire, but also the Republic, an even more interesting period in its own way. Bear in mind, too, that my wife is Korean, and that we live in Korea, in whose populace such thoughts are presumably much less common than in those of Western countries whose civilization plausibly descends from that of ancient Rome. (A Korean man, a librarian, with whom I discussed all this also professed not to understand why anyone would think about the Roman Empire every day, at least until he reflected upon his own love of stories of the Korean peninsula's Three Kingdoms period, which lasted from the first century BC until the seventh century AD.) A certain degree of obsession should, in any case, prove useful during however many years of preparation lie between now and my own, inevitable, Roman sojourn. Like Fellini or Sorrentino, Addis reminds us that to appreciate Rome requires cultivating a certain mindset. It's not about the ability to ignore the city's aura of thoroughgoing decay, say, or the behavior of its locals, which has been putting off foreigners since time immemorial, but rather about the ability to perceive all the more clearly the eternal qualities those things throw, ever more starkly, into contrast.
See also:
Harold Brodkey, My Venice (1998)
Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities) (1972)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His latest book, published in Korean, is 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea). Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.