“A delightful and immersive guide to the city of Rome and the philosophical tradition it embodies concerning the good life, or as we would say today, the meaning of life. Travelers seeking ancient wisdom among the city’s famous buildings and works of art could ask for no better companion.”
—Donald Robertson, author of
How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
a rotating gallery of images and insights related to Rome as a Guide to the Good Life
Giovanni da Udine, detail of garland in the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche (c. 1518). Sometimes a gourd penetrating a split fig is not just a gourd penetrating a split fig!
Guercino, St. Augustine, St. John the Baptist, and St. Paul the Hermit (1637-38), Sant’Agostino in Campo Marzio. With his upward-pointing finger like Plato in Raphael’s School of Athens, perhaps Augustine is here saying as he does in The Confessions, “Rejoice and delight in finding [God] who [is] beyond discovery rather than fail to find [God] by supposing [Him] to be discoverable.”
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Flavian Amphitheater (1757), a.k.a. the Colosseum. Our word “fornication” derives from the Latin word fornix, which means “vaulted chamber,” since prostitutes and illicit lovers often made use of nooks under arches.
Sistine Chapel. In this famous church commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV, I once overheard a tourist ask, “So where are the other fifteen chapels?”
Swift philosophical musings and updates on what I’m fascinated with and working on.
