Notes from the North 2 2025

The non-Catholic cemetery in Rome is a good place to spend some quiet time in. By mid-February the camellias are in flower and the box hedges make a sturdy fretwork of green through the grey crosses and tombstones. Keats has his grave here, as do Shelley and Gramsci, and many others less well-known. 

Backing onto one end of the cemetery is the huge centuries-old pyramid tomb the praetor (magistrate), Caius Cestius commissioned to hold his bones. 

It is still so perfect you might think it’s a monstrous testament to a 19th century rich man’s arrogance rather than the mausoleum of a Roman citizen who lived some time around 12 BC. But that’s Rome all over - the ruins and vestiges of ancient imperial grandeur and self-delusion still cluttering large parts of the city, rendering even the most superficial digging up of the roads and parks a delicate - and costly - business. 

 

The Centrale Montemartini is in the Ostiense quarter of the city a little further south from the cemetery. Until 1963 it supplied electricity to a sizeable part of Rome. It then lay empty for years but in the 1990s was brought back into use by the city as a museum to house antiquities from the Capitoline area. It makes a superb setting for its collection of marble effigies, mosaics and sarcophaguses. The two statues shown below were uncovered only inches below the ground when their excavation was begun. Both were still in an upright position waiting centuries to see the light of day once more. 



At present the city is tunnelling its way through other relics of past lives to create the line C of the metro. All around the Piazza Venezia there are hoardings proclaiming Rome’s commitment to preserving its past while building its future. 

 

Visit any one of the ancient sites in the city and if you ever read Shelley’s Ozymandias, (which perhaps no one does any more), you can’t help but think of that poem again. As we face threats coming fast and furious from all directions and in countless forms here it is to remind you of its timely wisdom. 

 

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said – ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert… 



near them on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,

Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing besides remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.




Which led me to listen to Ursula le Guin’s acceptance speech at the 2014 National Book Awards when she was given a special award for her distinguished contribution to American Letters. She didn’t speak for long but what she said was also prophetically relevant to the times we are now living through:

 

‘I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers, who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being and even imagine some real grounds for hope. 

 

We will need writers who can remember freedom, poets and visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. Right now I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art. … 

 

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. But so did the Divine Right of Kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. 

 

Resistance and change often begin in art and very often in the art of words… We who live by writing and publishing want our fair share of the proceeds but the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. It is freedom.’


A 21st century Roman fitting paving stones together


 

 

Comments

  1. Martin Raim22 February 2025 at 13:15

    Beautifully wrought and most timely, Rosemary. Thank you for Ozymandias and introducing me to le Guin’s acceptance speech, both powerful complements to your prose and images.

    ReplyDelete

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