Fedor Dostoyevsky once called the classic Europe a cemetery to which one goes to bow to dear graves. However, no better heritage of classic art than this has ever been created, whatever the all-time followers of modernism, who like throwing the classics off their pedestals, might say. Meanwhile, the classics remain.
What puts many tourists of refined tastes off the famous monuments is their popularity. For me, this does not matter. Will anything change if I feast my eyes on Rome after the same had been done by millions of ancients and our contemporaries? I have a sensation of being in a good society here, among people whose tastes I share. For the Eternal City can never become banal or hackneyed: genuine art, like sanctity, does not diminish because of a thousand years of contemplation and pilgrimage. I am deeply convinced that Rome is neither deception, nor a vogue, nor snobbery. Because every time you walk down its streets, the visible and invisible surrounding beauty touches a chord in you.
The Roman Pantheon was built under Emperor Hadrian (118-128 AD — Ed.), a little over a century after Jesus of Nazareth was born. Looked at from outside, it resembles an old fortress or a pagan temple, for it is austere, a little crude, and, what is more, deeply rooted in the soil. You go inside through the only door and immediately understand that the aim of the creators was not architecture or decor but something more elevated, the formation of a special space, a microcosm. High above your head is a gigantic dome, a hemisphere adorned with caissons. Blank windowless tiers of cylindrical walls with columns and pilasters. What strikes you is the subdued and simultaneously bright lighting. The point is there are no windows or lamps here, so it should be dark. The old masters managed to illuminate a huge interior space by means of only one 100 meter high hole in the dome center. The hole is nine meters in diameter, but it looks very small from the floor. This is why the good lighting seems to be a wonder. At a certain time of day, a supernatural cone of light shines down inside the Pantheon, as if from a mammoth searchlight hanging somewhere in the sky.
A dish-sized bronze circle is mounted in the floor right under the dome center. You must stand on this circle, pull yourself up, concentrate, and look very attentively into the sky through this magic hole. If you are lucky, you will see shadows of the ancient gods casting their gaze into the Pantheon.
You go down a usual street of the megalopolis: the crazy flow of cars and motorcycles, heat, souvenir baubles, tramps, pizza, and waterfall-shaped public hydrants. The whirlpool of an international crowd is raging: the old and the young with backpacks full of sandwiches, carbonated water bottles with spigots projecting over the shoulder, and small carpets. The latter will be spread to lie on in all kinds of places: on the asphalt or the marble floor of museums, under the walls of Coliseum, or near the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square. The scorching sun and the Babel of languages throw your thoughts into confusion and you begin to ask yourself faintheartedly: Where is it, the Eternal City?
At moments like this, something special is sure to happen to shame the fainthearted. For example, you enter an inconspicuous church only to rest a little in the cool and silence. And you suddenly realize this is St. Peter’s Basilica, with Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of Moses to the right of the altar. The prophet is seated keeping under his right hand the Stone Tablets with the Ten Commandments God had just dictated. The left hand is nervously twisting a shock of bushy and long beard. You are afraid to look the prophet in the seemingly calm face: there is so much wrath, scorn, and threat there! The prophet has come down from Mount Sinai and found that while he was writing down the Law, his people had begun to worship a golden calf (our contemporary lawmakers also seem to keep getting into similar situations). Michelangelo depicted the prophet in the last moment before the terrible explosion: the Old Testament says the infuriated Moses even smashed the Tablets against the ground.
Having breathed the refreshing air of pure art, you can continue along the streets of Rome to your heart’s content.
