“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
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1645-52). Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria. Teresa of Avila writes of her experience of God, “The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.” A wit in front of this sculpture once quipped, “If that’s the experience of God, I know it well.”
Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1609), Galleria Borghese. “H-AS.O.S” is inscribed on the sword’s blade, an acronym of a phrase from Augustine, “Humilitas occidit superbiam” (Humility slays pride), in a commentary on Psalm 33 where the philosopher notes that David’s defeat of Goliath is like Christ’s defeat of the Devil. “David represented Christ, as Goliath represented the devil, and when David laid Goliath low he prefigured Christ, who crushed the devil. But what is Christ, who cut down the devil? He is humility, the humility that slew pride.”
Grave of John Keats, Protestant Cemetery. Keats died in obscurity in his apartment on the Spanish Steps, where in his suffering he heard the burbling of the Fontana della Barcaccia. It made him think of lines from the Jacobean play Philaster, “As you are living, all your better deeds/ Shall be in water writ, but this in Marble:/ No Chronicle shall speak you.”
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius (1618-19). Galleria Borghese. Virgil (Aeneid, Book 2) has Aeneas say to his father, “Hoist yourself on my shoulders: the weight won’t weigh on me./ Whatever happens, it will be the same for us both:/ a shared risk, a shared salvation.” On a related note, Seneca observes in Of Consolation, “The movement of the human race is perpetual: in this vast world some changes take place daily.”
Recycled columns, the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere. In Richard Tavener’s translation of Erasmus’s Prouerbes (1545), we read, “Ye may use this prouerbe when ye wol signifie that one daye . . . is not ynoughe for . . . acheuinge . . . a great matter . . . Rome was not buylt in one day.” It’s the first appearance in English of a proverb that goes back as far as medieval French poetry. It probably originated around the same time that this basilica was completed in 1143.
Swift philosophical musings and updates on what I’m fascinated with and working on.
