Rome, 12: Parva. sed apta mihi

In the Coppedè

Via Damaso Cerquetti, April 25, 2017—

ON THE OTHER HAND, if you are going to build palaces, why not build them with taste and thoughtfulness?

The Italian word for "apartment house" or "apartment building" is, amusingly I think, palazzo: we have been occupying a palace of our own these last three weeks. I've described it and its environs and won't repeat here, other than to note that for the most part these palazzi, built within the last fifty years, are handsome in a plain way: internally for their ease of maintenance and care for light and silence; outside for their uniformity, relieved by their siting on curved streets, or straight but short ones, and, again, their openness to light and sky.

Yesterday, though, we strolled through a part of town I particularly like to show new visitors to Rome, the Coppedé district. Done only a little less successfully this quarter might be annoying, little more than Hollywood stage-set. But the architectural detail, the scale, the siting, the play among styles, shapes, and sizes, and the landscaping — all this makes a splendid example of comfortable, tasteful, bourgeois communal residence.

You take the tram to the piazza Buenos Aires, either the number 19 from the Piazza Risorgimento, near the Vatican, or the tram 3 from Trastevere. At the Piazza you'll find Santa Maria Addolorata, a remarkable church built between 1910 and 1930 in a fanciful, part historicist and part modern style that foretells the pleasures to come in the Coppedé district beyond. You're attracted to the church first for its siting: it's set at a forty-five degree angle to the Viale Regina Margherita, between its sober yet pleasing bell-tower and a cluster of trees.

The facade is decorated with a truly beautiful mosaic in gold and blue, responding to the one (just now undergoing restoration, so unfortunately behind veiling) so many miles away across the Tiber on Santa Maria di Trastevere. If you know the two churches you can almost see and hear them conversing about Byzantine mosaicists, sheep, and faith, as if the bustle of the Via Veneto and the Spanish Steps were utterly inconsequential. I supposer it's politically incorrect, in art-history terms, to equate the two mosaics, but I'll set them side by side anyway. Maybe art critics shook their heads at the Byzantine artists when they were working in Trastevere, finding their work garish and modern and not at all appropriate let alone to their taste.

Santa Maria Addolorata: facade

For all the drama and exuberant color of this mosaic there's something domestic and modest about the building itself. It was constructed by the Argentine community in Rome (hence the Piazza Buenos Aires, and perhaps hence the delay in its completion, for financial reasons), and — perhaps only because one knows this — the architectural style seems to have something modified-Iberian about it. Inside, though, historicism takes over: there are nods to the early style of San Giorgio in Velabro.

The baldacchino is neoclassical, reminiscent of Greek temples, supported on granite columns, but behind it a striking mosaic in the apse portrays the Deposition beneath a cross whose curved arms, following the curve of the wall, seem ready to embrace the viewer. And an even more striking mosaic of Mary in her glory, at a side chapel, is nearly blinding in its use of gold: Salvador Dali would have been envious in the way this depiction seems to translate Mary into pure light and energy.

Walk from the church up the Via Tagliamento a short block to come to a monumental gate formed by fantastic buildings arching to one another across the Via Dora (Hello there, Piemonte!), and you enter the magic world of Coppedè. Ahead is an enormous fountain clearly thinking of the Fountain of the Rivers in the Piazza Navona. It's clearly temporary; no one will ever steal its statues to put in a museum, or burn for lime, because they're concrete with plaster skin, peeling here and there. That's what historicism is all about: accelerated ruination. In his fascinating book The Memory of the Modern Matt Matsuda writes about this:

As History accelerates, the "lieux de mémoire" are designated sites which defy time's destroyer, the places of commemoration where memory anchors the past… my subjects are… histories of accelerated memory, subjected to the dramatic rhythms of an age.

(Elsewhere he writes, I think, something like "cultures accelerate themselves to death".)

In the Coppedè

Now there's no denying there's some wishfulness and some nostalgia going on here, particularly when you consider Coppedè began designing this district just before the outbreak of the First World War, and built it through that war and the buildup of Italian fascism. But it seems to me his vision has the redeeming qualities of optimism and pleasure. I look at these buildings, designed as residences in the first place, with, I'm sure, servants' quarters, and I think of Moravia's novel Gli indiffernti, which portrays the nature of a private and social life made too complacent by excess money and a paucity of things-to-do-with-one's-self.

On the other hand, as I keep saying. On the other hand, there's a relatively smaller building bearing the delightful inscription

PARVA, SED APTA MIHI, SED NULLI OBNOXIA

which turns out, with a little Googling, to bave been the device Ariosto inscribed on his own "last house" in Ferrara:

Small, but suits me, and no one can

and here it gets difficult:

take advantage of it, [since] it's decorous, and bought with my own money.

(The part beginning with [since] may continue around the corner of the building: I wasn't able to tell, from the street.)

Ariosto! Who would have thought he'd turn up here — but why not? These buildings now house foundation offices and embassies, many of the latter representing African nations. So Coppedè, in his architectural and city-planning design, links the emerging African nationalism of our time to the sprezzatura of the Florentine renaissance.

I think, given the maddening increase in world population, and its increasing urbanization, and the need to achieve a sustainable and equable economy, not to mention the need to address climate change and to eliminate warfare, the only hope for the future is a kind of socialized technocracy. If it comes, I hope there are places for Coppedès, and for tramlines too, and for the possibility of pleasurable strolls, on foot or with slow wheeled assistance. Propriety and the appropriate pace of intended decay-repair-and-replacement is what should be foremost in civic agendas.