On Bridges #1

They figure largely in the stories I know and love, from the Billy Goats Gruff through Horatius at the Sublician Bridge.  Concord, Kwai, Remagen, and Khazad-Dum.  Almost always at a moment of reckoning, in a crucial juncture in some history. 

Of course, we wouldn’t know these bridges were it not for what happened on or across them.  But they are a transitional structure, liminal and also rhetorical in their insistence that they are the one and only way across a stream, a river, a gorge or chasm.  Perhaps we make them beautiful because they embody a language of connection—of links between what we know and what we have yet to discover.

Among its Roman ruins, the Aosta Valley contains three notable bridges: the Pont de Pierre in the town of Aosta itself, the Pont-Saint-Martin, and the Pont d'Aël.  All are remarkably preserved—the Pont de Pierre a bit occluded and domesticated by the late medieval buildings that surround it—but each suggests at more than a simple overpass or viaduct.  They are part of the Roman language of conquest, if you look at them carefully and consider what you see.

Of the three bridges, the Pont-Saint-Martin (built probably sometime in the 1^st century BCE) is the most famous.  A medieval legend has attached itself, and it goes something like this: Saint Martin, the Bishop of Tours, was returning to France, but found his way blocked by the river Lys, which had swept away the only crossing passage during a flood.  The resourceful saint cuts a deal with the Devil, who promises to build a bridge over the river in exchange for the soul of the first one to cross it.  Martin accepts the proposal, but in a nice reversal of the “devil in the details” stories we all have heard, triumphs on a technicality: he throws a piece of bread across the river, enticing a hungry dog to cross, thereby foiling (and infuriating) the devil, who vanishes in the river with a sulfurous explosion, leaving the bridge behind.  The carnival at Pont-Saint-Martin celebrates this confrontation, and concludes by burning an effigy of the devil under the bridge.

A fanciful story, its rhetoric evident.  The Romans and their culture translated into devils and demons, the bridge baptized in a display of Christian ingenuity.  Christ supplants Caesar in the clear-cut dynamic of good and evil, the burning effigy a fire ignited early, not long after the great transition of Constantine and Rome’s official embrace of the Faith (both Constantine and St. Martin are 4^th century figures).  The Pont-Saint-Martin spans an historical era, the passage from one world to the next.  Of the three bridges, this one has the clearest argument: you have to look closer to read the others.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On Visiting and Staying: A Reflection

Everyone recognizes that our style of living when we travel is much different than when we stay at home.  The anonymity of the hotel room, the level of observation when sights and sites that are everyday to a resident are things that we, as visitors or vacationers, see for the first (and possibly the only) time.  Understandably, there’s a tolerance (especially in tourist areas) toward the blunders and misdirection of strangers: despite American tourists’ return to the States with horror stories about our mistreatment at the hands of resentful locals, I’ve received far ruder treatment from my countrymen than I ever do from people I meet abroad (though I’m sure the Italians have their share of inhospitality, you’re not very likely to find it in a tourist area, where livelihood depends on courtesy to strangers, and sometimes even the most discourteous ones).

So it’s different when you travel from when you stay.  But when have you ceased to tour and begun to take up residence?  I think I have a domestic streak that finds myself at home readily—a lucky quality to have as a traveler.  When I return to lodgings after only several days, there is a sense of gaining my bearings, as though some interior sense of balance is restored in the play where I am staying, the vestibular system signaling my acclimation, the road anxiety kicking back into my recesses.  The flat in Aosta with its long corridor, bulky, almost monumental furniture, and glimpse of the Alps over the rooftop (I've inserted pictures of both), became home within the week, and the neighborhood became my neighborhood (after one irritating and hot afternoon of getting lost only a block or two from the place).  I adjust easily: as habitual as the old man I am becoming, my first trepidation at any change falls away quickly, and I find the routine in the strange and set my feet there.

But how does the transition go?  When do we stop visiting and start staying? 

You begin to stay, I think, when domestic tasks return to your daily patterns.  You cook at home, clean the apartment, shop for groceries and for little, temporary items (a paring knife, a cheap alarm clock) unavailable in the place you are staying. The curiosity of Italian supermarkets—handling the fruit and vegetables with plastic gloves, large butcher shops and a dearth of pre-packaged meats, the glory of an extensive wine aisle—becomes customary eventually, and you adopt a version of the pattern you had at home.

You begin to stay when you learn your neighbors.  When you have neighbors, actually. The woman at the laundry who knows no English and negotiates task and cost through signs and pantomime, the brilliance of her invention a source of marvel to you at first, but customary as you return.  The barber who slyly compliments your virtually non-existent Italian, and reveals on the second visit that he was a jazz drummer back in the day, in Greenwich Village, showing you his CD, where his own able compositions are fitted among popular standards like “Over the Rainbow” and “Someone to Watch Over Me”.  The lovely green-haired young woman behind the counter in the bakery, who begins to use your visits as an opportunity to learn English and progresses remarkably as the weeks unfold, her learning curve a product of intelligence and youth, but also an intense curiosity about the world around her.

You begin to stay, oddly enough, once the wanderlust returns.  When there’s a part of the town or the region that provokes another curiosity, sets your steps away from the neighborhood—your neighborhood by now—toward a new street, a new stop on the rail or bus line, toward a land you have heard of.  You begin to stay when you become restless, and in that sense, staying is a prelude to wandering once again.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On Owning Up

I’ve told my travel writing students to check facts.  It’s not simply a matter of honesty, though.  Very often questions of courtesy arise out of the impulses of responsibility, and the issue is not only one of truth but of an even wider integrity.

Which is why, today, I am owning up about my Ljubljana entry late last month.  That it was an honest error I hope you’ll believe.  But I stand here corrected nonetheless, and in a way I hope will enlighten some of you as it did me.

A while after I posted the article about our Slovenian trip, I received an email from my friend Vlado, who corrected—with his typical graciousness and good humor—a mistake I made in the chronicling.  Let him speak for himself, in the words of his amiable letter:

by the way - got a phone call from Slovenian president (it is a small country!) and some "anonymous threatening letters" (probably nationalists) about that "jeans matter”

Typical of his humor—sly and playful—but he goes on to make a point about a situation that at some time I had known, but had conveniently shed the knowledge as I wrote my entry on Ljubljana:

former Yugoslavia had quite open borders and also all same/similar consumer goods as in Italy/Austria and rest of the Europe (of course there were some import restrictions as well, but only for very special goods or quantity limits for personal import)... so - no typical "border bribes" in form of jeans.   I'd been talking about Czechoslovakia and Russia (Soviet bloc - no jeans or jeans factories there) - former Yugoslavia was not in the same bloc.

Yes, I’d known about Yugoslavia’s non-alignment under Tito and after, known that the more open borders and the dramatically varied terrain had served as locations for U.S. and Western films as varied as Kelly’s Heroes to portions of Fiddler on the Roof.  But one border story—Vlado’s about crossing into Czechoslovakia in the old days—had dispelled my previous knowledge and pushed me back onto the stereotype of my American raising: how everything behind (or even remotely around) the “Iron Curtain” was barbed wire and statues of Stalin, tinted in relentless grayscale and sunless because we chose to see it that way.

And Vlado, gently but with a focused wisdom, pointed to the heart of the error:

seems in the rule, "the big one" or isolated countries don't have much or correct information about the rest of the world (or perhaps even about real situation in their own country - who knows)... on other side small nations/countries collect all possible information and learn as much as they can about big countries - what do you think?

Well, Vlado, I think you may be right.  Bargaining and traveling from a tradition of economic and global privilege that has lasted my life, my countrymen are too ready to assume that the world is the way we see it, forgetting that we bring the vision, the outline, the colors of the country with us on our journey.  We characterize others according to the images we have nurtured and often distorted for generations (and I believe other countries more economically powerful do this as well—particularly Russia and China at the moment) and are surprised when others don’t match our assumptions.  And yes, smaller countries do this as well—it’s all part of what Richard Pryor used to characterize as “a lot of people getting together to not understand each other,” and therefore part of a human condition.  But maybe people in power tend to misunderstand more because the margin of error is greater. 

What to do about this?  Listen, read, and be willing to stand corrected—all difficult activities for most Americans I know, and I trust the resistance can be found in  other countries as well. But you can still be who you are, stand in integrity, and do those things.  Some of our biggest mistakes come when we think we can’t.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On a Side Trip to Ljubljana

I remember a melancholy conversation, twenty-five years ago or so, with a dear friend of mine who had spent a large part of his childhood in Mexico.  He was telling me about a recent trip there, and about his return, standing at the very edge of Texas and looking south across a rather sparse and forbidding landscape.  Thinking of Mexico, thinking, I wish, just once, that God would bless this country.

There are places throughout the world where that thought arises, and at the time when we were having that conversation, Slovenia was one of them.  Part of what we called “the Soviet bloc”, it was lumped with a dozen or so areas in Eastern and Central Europe that the American schoolchild was hard pressed to distinguish or even identify—which one, after all, was Estonia among those former republics along the Baltic?  They were the villains in our Cold War mythology, or at best the unwilling but submissive assistants to the villain—a villain who wore Khrushchev’s or Brezhnev’s face, and had promised to bury us just as it had buried them.

You could see traces of a sorrowful history in the small antique market set up on Sunday morning along the banks of the Ljubljanica: from the imposing Habsburg architecture to the medals adorned with the SS runes and the swastika, the Soviet red star. 

Surely, after of centuries of this, God would bless this country.

And sure enough, the signs are there.

Traveling north with Vlado (whom we met before in Prague [see the January 19^th entry] and Rudi, our Slovenian friends, we watched the landscape change from the dry, poplar-studded Italian terrain to something more mountainous, thick with evergreens, familiar sights to those whose vistas include the American North.  A terrific ice storm had struck this region in late winter, and all around lay the wreckage of trees, and far from the highway, the occasional collapsed roofs of older buildings.  But it was a healthy land just dealt a punch, by no means a chronic condition.

And that health extends to the human landscape.  As we neared the Slovenian border, Vlado, always one for smart (if prankish) humor, asked us if we had our passports.  As I reached for mine, he broke into a grin, announcing, “Because you don’t need them!”  This not only marked what I really did not realize until this year—the friendly and convenient fluidity of European borders—but also was the occasion for our friends’ recounting of times they passed through checkpoints when they were twenty-five, thirty years younger.  Apparently, those gates were not manned by Kalashnikov-toting party faithful, but usually boys like they were themselves back then, sleepy and bored and bribable, Vlado assured us, for a pair of Levis.  He said that you never knew, the fact that I was wearing jeans that day might end up coming in handy.

Embarrassing as well, I thought.

After my travels in Budapest and Prague, I had suspended most preconceptions as to what I would find in a Central European capital.  Even so, Ljubljana is a fresh and beautiful surprise.  Its central city reminds me of Dublin’s for some reason—curled around the banks of a quiet river, a wedding of 18^th century streets and modern boutique commerce.  The weekend we were there was a bit overcast, but I’ve found that the clouds and the banked sunlight evoke the brighter colors in older areas of European cities—Dublin and Venice and Prague and now Ljubljana, all of which emerge beautifully in a grey day.  If you take the funicular—one of the inclined railways you see on occasion in this part of Europe (though this is one of the nicer ones)—you arrive at Ljubljana Castle, where a once-military view of the city, where the brick-red roofs of the central pedestrian zones give way to a modernized, extraordinarily new-looking expanse of cityscape.  You wonder how Western attention has passed by this beautiful place, and part of you suspects that the oversight hasn’t been the worst thing in the world for the city.

In its central areas, Ljubljana is a community of statues.  Poets and artists, for the most part, and it was humbling to realize that 1) these were exactly the people I always maintain a city should honor, and 2) that I recognized so few of them.  Among them were France Prešeren, a Romantic poet known for historical and mythic narration as well, and Jože Plečnik, an architect who virtually defined the look of this city.  Prešeren is for another time, perhaps: I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read a line, and therefore have nothing yet to say.  As to Plečnik, my lack of knowledge is a hindrance here as well, but the buildings make immediate statement to the eye, and what struck me was something that lingers in my thoughts of Ljubljana—its brilliant eclecticism.

Plečnik’s buildings sit side by side with the city’s Habsburg imposition—the monumental, 18^th century Viennese declarations of dominance and power.  I mentioned to my resident Plečnik expert, the remarkable 17-year-old David (Rudi’s son and Vlado’s nephew—see again January 19^th entry), that the Habsburgs “had a habit of sticking their nose into things,” to which he slyly responded, “and we Slovenians have a habit of complaining about them.”  It was David who pointed out the mix of design and medium that characterized Plečnik’s work—from the wedding of brick and stone in the National Library to the church Rudi took us to at the margins of the city. 

And this quality, above all others, was what struck me about Ljubljana, as well.  The brilliant, improvisational nature of its tradition, both historical and contemporary: from its integrity and artistic rebellions against the cultures that overwhelmed it by force but not by genius, to its transformations within our lifetimes from a world where young men bribe border guards with Levis to beautiful, open-air cafes, where at least half a dozen languages can be overheard at late dinner, it seems to have wedded tradition and change like Plečnik’s merging of brick and stone—a young old city in lovely and fascinating transition.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On Mussolini's Wolf

Alongside the Roman ruins in Aosta, not far from its crumbling medieval and Renaissance churches,  the Piazza della Repubblica frames a fairly busy intersection, a roundabout on the Via Vodice, a number of vending stands, restaurants and bars.  All kinds of bustle that, if you’re an attentive pedestrian trying to avoid being run over in a crosswalk, might distract you from a good look at the piazza itself, famous for its Fascist architecture and sculpture.

We get uncomfortable with the word “fascist”.  Justifiably, it draws forth nightmarish associations.  Less so in Italy, where the films of Mussolini are generally those of him speaking from a balcony, clownish and overwrought, mugging for the crowds and the cameras.  Our associations are those of totalitarian darkness, wrongful imprisonment: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet—though not all are technically fascist, we have come to lump their crimes together, and we know them, to some degree, for who they were.  And the art of the totalitarian state has something coercive about it, from Riefenstahl’s breathtakingly beautiful (but malign) Triumph of the Will to the drab depictions of a Worker’s Paradise in Soviet Socialist Realism—all of it, whether technically brilliant or ham-handed, pushes us toward embracing an ideology, a compelled way of life.

But I’ve been struck by the Piazza della Repubblica, and by the revelation that, in this case, I find the fascist art appealing. 

Give me a minute to explain.

Art that enforces an assumed point of view is almost always far down the list of my preferences.  It’s why I never liked Alice Walker, too, by the way (sorry, friends on the Left): when ideology trumps exploration and discovery, when art confirms whatever conclusions you’d already drawn before you encountered it, it loses one of the ways it can best catch on to our imaginations: the challenge of making us consider otherwise. 

Photo: Morgana Germanetto

And the thing about the fascist art of Piazza della Repubblica is that it enforces less than it inveigles.  An obvious thing about the Mussolini period is its adoption of Roman symbols, very often the animal symbolism that accompanied the legends of the empire.  The she-wolf—the legendary creature who nursed Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome—stands atop a column, perpetually framed by the Alps and the deep, bright, merciless Italian sky, so that from a distance she is all the nursemaid a demi-god would want.  But with a closer look, she seems ragged---much more like a wolf in the wild than a symbolic wolf, a mythic wolf.  She is frail up against that deep sky, her legs spindly and braced, both to nurse and simply to stand in two worlds—that of legend, and that of an observed and vulnerable nature.  

Photo: Chantal Piscetta

And the same goes for the eagles facing her, the totemic birds that perch along the gate to the old army barracks, the Caserma Testafochi.  In deep focus behind the guardians of the gate you can see the Roman eagles, symmetrical and abstract, fit to top the standard of a legion, but the guardians are bedraggled, all gristle and feathers, looking back at their ancestors on the cornices of the building, as though they are measuring themselves against the ideal birds, as though they sense the gap of 2500 years.

Photo: Chantal Piscetts

And in this is the challenge and appeal of Mussolini’s artists—that they were better artists than fascists.  Stalin and Goebbels longed for a representative art whose interpretation was simple, direct, and pretty much unequivocal: you look at the statue or poster or film, and you come away with what you expected, with your beliefs affirmed.  Goebbels himself publicly hated everything about Modernism—its fragmentation, its abstraction and suggestion, in short, everything that provoked the audience to imagine, interpret, and think.  Earlier movements such as Symbolism and Impressionism had been condemned as "decadent," as products of mental or visual illness: the artists, quite simply, didn’t see the world the way it was supposed to be seen.

In Italy, though, there was less fear of the difficult.   In fact, many of Italian Futurists—artists who embraced the abstract, fragmented, and mechanized elements of contemporary culture—supported the fascists at first, and before historic parting of ways, had an influence on state art.  And there is something both appealing and challenging in the sculptures on the Piazza della Repubblica: are we following in the footsteps of Rome, or are we haunted by its presence, diminished creatures that can never match its worldly power, though we look over our shoulders at totemic eagles?  The creatures of the piazza challenge us by their associations and positioning: they are examples of symbols caught halfway between heaven and earth, and from that middle ground, casting a kind of ironic skepticism on both the mythic and the natural world, which interpenetrate so thoroughly that, on beholding the wolf and the eagles, you’re struck by the thought that neither world has the whole story.   ©2014 Michael Williams

On Five Excellent Things About Aosta

I promise that there are even more excellent things to this little town than the ones I list below.  The nuance of a place, its particular beauties, reveal themselves over time, and with a month behind me and a month still ahead.  The sights—the traditional streets, pedestrian and cobbled, with the ancient ruins among them, the churches and the historical record of St. Anselm of Canterbury, the daunting and bedazzling Alps that wall in the town on every side—all are certainly attractive to someone who would want to visit.  Living here, on the other hand, you notice other things: the patterns of daily life that are and are not home.  Having awakened in Italy, I have been learning to follow the life in a quiet, remote part of that country.  And I love the experience, the schooling it gives you about who you are, what you value and assume.

               So here is a list, off the top of my head in no particular order, of five excellent things about the little town of Aosta, which is my current home.  Before I begin, though, I still have to honor the Alps, despite saying above that I would focus on daily, “non-touristy” things.  In my defense, the Alps are the daily backdrop for the Aostans, who awake to the mountains encircling them, green to a height, terraced with vineyards until the soil gives way to the slate-grey rock and above that, so high you have to tilt your head up from wherever you stand in the town, the white peaks, as in the photo from the balcony of my flat.  Mont Blanc is on the northwest horizon, and Shelley was no less impressed with it 200 years ago, although he said it a lot better:

         Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

                   Mont Blanc appears--still, snowy, and serene;

                   Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

                   Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

                   Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

                   Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

                   And wind among the accumulated steeps.

It’s beneath that kind of spectacle that the Aostans live, and from what I can tell, they don’t take it for granted, because who could?  But here are elements more everyday, that upon leaving here, I won’t take for granted myself:

1.      The town is extraordinarily clean.  Each morning the shopkeepers wash and mop down the cobblestones in front of their stores, a dusty stream trickling into the central gutter of the street, like it did in medieval times, then flowing down the sewer grates, leaving the streets not only clear but also scrubbed.  This is by nine in the morning, and though litter may gather on the streets by the end of the day, it’s kept in check by the merchants’ watchful eyes: like good chefs, they know part of the appeal is the presentation, and for someone who comes from the American mid-South, this kind of upkeep is almost glamorous in contrast to home.

2.      

      The children are unfailingly fascinating to watch.  Like at home, they come in all shades of hair and skin—slimmer, more groomed, though, and even if the clothes are not expensive brands, they wear what they have attentively, without the high fashion you would find down the road in Milan, or the bourgeois conformity you get used to seeing around town at home, but a simple, elegant mindfulness with a few American-slogan T shirts thrown into the mix.  And it’s remarkable to watch the swagger of the little boys when they’re about ten or eleven: they seem to be waiting for Scorsese’s accelerated frame-speed to slow down the walk, to give it a comic version of the menace and drama of the guys just walkin’ along in Goodfellas or Casino.

3.     

      For a town where little English is spoken (as opposed to larger cities like Florence or Venice), the world is surprising easy to negotiate linguistically.  If I say “scusi” or “mi dispiace” enough, people begin to see that I’m sorry, I can’t help being a virtually monolingual American whose feeble grasp of Latin will take me only so far down their road before, if they are kind (and almost all of them are) they have to extend a hand and guide me.  There’s a great passage in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities that it reminds me of, where Marco Polo, newly arrived from Venice, begins to talk to Kublai Khan, the great Emperor:  Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks: ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes--which he arranged in front of him like chessmen. Returning from the missions on which Kuhlai sent him, the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret.  I negotiated my laundry with an able, brilliant woman who had not a shred of English: with my dozen or so phrases of Italian, pantomime, pointing to calendars and clocks, we arranged what I wanted done to the clothing (nothing needed dry-cleaning, grazie), how much it would cost, and when I would pick it up.  After which, we stared at one another, sighed deeply and laughed, as though we had carried a piano up a flight of steps together.  Throughout the town, kindness and good humor have met my sparse and damaged Italian, and thanks to laughter and resourcefulness, every job has been done.

4.      At the University, on the other hand, the level of fluency has been a great relief and a godsend.  I knew from preliminary correspondence that my colleagues at the University of Valle d’Aosta spoke English like natives, but it was a great delight to discover the skills of the students.  The conversations were sophisticated, they got my jokes (except for one of them, and I’m thinking it was far more likely that the joke was bad than that their comprehension failed them) and their writing, aside from a few little quirks in phrasing and idiom, might easily be mistaken for that of my own students back in Louisville (and this is not a dig at my Louisville students—the Aosta students were really that good).  I spent two pleasant afternoons walking around town with these young people as I helped them devise and focus the subjects of travel articles I’d assigned them to write: it was discussion, question-and-answer, and undergraduate banter without gaps in communication and interpretation.  I think it was that much more pleasant because I was hungry for English, for good old-fashioned casual talk, and the students I had were bringers of that joy.

5.      Fifth on my list has been the personal joy of new colleagues.  With a small faculty for the English classes, the university has managed to cover a wide range of instruction and do it well.  It’s obvious they work hard, and at a number of universities, and yet it’s all done with good cheer and enthusiasm.  Excellent conversationalists and dinner companions, they all know how to live the life of the mind while having a fond acquaintance with just plain living in general.  So my thanks for hospitality extend to Carlo Bajetta, Anna Anselmo, Rosie Crawford, and my friend the incomparable Allesandro Stanchi, who has kept me from imploding with all the practical matters involved with living elsewhere for two months (those of you who know me well, know that practical matters and I don’t readily mix).  It’s an extension of this town’s kindness, and a pleasure to be taken in immediately and without question as a colleague.

6.      I said five things.  But here’s a little something extra.  Also, alive and well in the culture of Aosta is the concept of what’s called lagniappe in New Orleans.  A custom where the shopkeeper gives you something extra in your purchase.  The most famous example of this is, of course, the 13th item that makes up the “baker’s dozen”, but examples in Aosta have been an extra pair of oranges from a fruit shop, extra portions of fontina cheese, some really decent spreads of food with aperitifs at a restaurant called Ad Forum, and, at a Chinese restaurant off Chanoux Square in the center of the city, an after-dinner liqueur, home-made, that would send Marco Polo packing for the East with “cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings” Of course, a lot of this generosity might come because Alessandro knows everyone…or knows someone who knows someone who knows someone…and it’s that connectedness, that spirit of community, that ties so many of these things together and has become what I love most about Aosta, about the part of Italy I’ve seen in general.   ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Ruins in Aosta

tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas,

omnia destruitis vitiataque dentibus aevi              

paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte!

My Latin is rusty, but it goes something like this:

Time, devourer of things, and you, jealous Age,

destroy all and, gnawing slowly with your teeth,

a little at a time, consume all in death!

It’s from Ovid, from around the period that the Roman town of Aosta was being built.  Beautiful lines, but nothing unusual in its sentiments about the doings of time.  Time devours, age wears away, and eventually nothing is left of what is built to last for ages.  It’s sobering enough to be no longer sobering, because we can’t think in millennia.  To me a month spreads out like infinite time when I miss my wife and family, and though I know intellectually how short a stint that is, within its span, feeling it with  heart and imagination, it dilates, becomes a small eternity.

               Even more so the stretch of two thousand years, and Aosta is both marked and undergirded by ruins that old.  From the Augustan arch at the eastern end of the central city, the still-dramatic theater closer to where I live, literally down to the tunnels and arcades beneath its medieval and Renaissance street plan, the city is a hive of ghosts. 

               Is there a way of looking at these ruins other than Ovid’s gloomy thoughts about the provisional, the temporary, the way all things must pass?  Probably not for any length of time.  Thinking otherwise must pass, too, and we are left with the transitory state of things.

               I do remember, though, the first Roman ruin I saw.  It was far from here: an aqueduct in North Wales.  I recall marveling that the Welsh narrow-gage train track that once had spanned the top of the structure—probably late in the 19^th or early in the 20^th century—had fallen to rust and decay, while the aqueduct, though worn and marked by rooted weeds, was still steady and upright.  There are degrees, I guess, of permanence.  There is a kind of lingering at the gate before you go.

               It’s basically common knowledge that all great Roman building depends upon the arch.  Nor are Aosta’s ruins an exception: the great defining structure of Roman triumph is everywhere, from the Praetorian Gates to the venturesome arches of the theater, through which these days, if the weather is clear, you can easily see the Alps.

               Which brings me to something about the ruins that I’ve thought about for several days.  The arch as support is one thing, but it is also a gateway, a passage.  Beneath the Augustan Arch is now a crucifix: the space it covers is now marked by the crucified God, inconceivable to the builders of the emperor’s original monument.  And of course the Alps through the arches of the theater, where the whole of nature can behold our little plays through the crumbling things we have made.  Both sides of the Praetorian Gate open into narrow, Renaissance city streets, so that the passage through them, in the footsteps of Roman legions, takes you from one beautiful road into another, equally beautiful but pretty much the same.

               Underground, though, is the cryptoporticus—excavated and restored over the last century—that is the monument to the liminality of these ruins, how they linger to suggest at a ghostly passage that underlies us all.  The arcade, as restored, extends for about fifty yards beneath the city, beneath the cathedral, then doubles back on itself, so that the wanderers emerge, like characters in a myth, pretty much at the stairs where they first descended.  Pockets of natural light, fractured through boarded windows, let you know that this passage was once ground level: a kind of “cloister walk” that framed the holy space of the Roman forum.

               And there is still a residual sanctity to the passage.  There’s a hush as you follow its long stretch beneath a city still occupied by Rome, its Christianity a colony of Catholicism, its holiness mingled with that of an earlier time.  It is hard to travel it unchanged: you welcome the light on your return, fully aware that what you have brushed against was a gate to the country of myth, but that lingering at the doorway, rather than turning back or passing through, is itself only a still point, a momentary stay against the maws of time.   ©2014 Michael Williams