Fleeting Rome In Search of La Dolce Vita Carlo Levi Translated by Antony Shugaar John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Carlo Levi (1902 1972), writer, painter and politician, was one of the great Italian talents of the twentieth century. He was interned in the South of Italy as an anti-fascist during the Second World War, where he wrote his masterpiece, Cristo si é fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli). The work was subsequently turned into a film and became recognized as one of the great works of twentieth-century literature. Subsequent works have included a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, including L Orologio (1950), Le parole sono pietre (1955), Le mille patrie, Lo specchio and Scritti di critica d arte. From 1963 to 1972 he was Senator of the Republic.
Fleeting Rome In Search of La Dolce Vita Carlo Levi Translated by Antony Shugaar John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
This edition published in 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, England Phone (+44) 1243 779777 Original edition published in Italian by Donzelli Editore, Rome. Original edition copyright Donzelli Editore, Roma 2002. All rights reserved. English language edition published by arrangement with Eulama Literary Agency, Rome, Italy. English language translation copyright John Wiley and Sons Ltd. First published in the UK in July 2004. E-mail (for orders and customer service enquires): cs-books@wiley.co.uk Visit our Home Page on www.wiley.co.uk or www.wiley.com All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 0LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher should be addressed to the Permissions Department John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, England, or e-mailed to permreq@wiley.co.uk, or faxed to (44) 1243 770620. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Other Wiley Editorial Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741, USA Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH, Pappellaee 3, D-69469 Weinheim, Germany John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd, 33 Park Road, Milton, Queensland, 4064, Australia John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte Ltd, 2 Clementi Loop #02-01, Jin Xing Distripark, Singapore 129809 John Wiley & Sons Canada Ltd, 22 Worcester Road, Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada, M9W 1L1 Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the US Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-47087184-9 Typeset in 9.5/14 pt Arrus by Sparks, Oxford www.sparks.co.uk Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper responsibly manufactured from sustainable forestry in which at least two trees are planted for each one used for paper production. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents Preface Introduction: Eternal and Fleeting Translator s Note vii xiii xxxv I The People of Rome 1 II The Solitude of Rome 25 III The Two-Cent Coin 31 IV Sunday Stroll 37 V The Helicopter 43 VI Apparitions in Rome 51 VII The Duty of the Comet 57 VIII Elegy to the Mid-August Holidays 65 IX Hyperbolic Tourism 71 X Killing Time 77 XI Points of View 83 XII The Power of the Poor 89 XIII Brigands and Peasants 95 XIV Plants and Seeds 103 XV The Steps of Rome 111 XVI The Empty Cities 119
CONTENTS XVII Girls and Trees 125 XVIII A Dawn in Rome 131 XIX Summer Journey 137 XX The New Moon 143 XXI San Lorenzo and San Paolo 149 XXII A Child in Flight 155 XXIII After the Party 163 XXIV Substance and Chance 171 XXV Clothes Moths 179 XXVI Japanese Toys 187 XXVII Football and Men of Letters 193 XXVIII The Drainage Ditch and the Measles 199 XXIX A Boy Steals a Car Radio in the Piazza Navona 205 XXX The Labyrinth 213 XXXI City of Brothers 219 XXXII Summer Dissolves in Mists 227 XXXIII Fleeting Rome 233 Notes to the Text 237 Basic Chronology of Carlo Levi s Life 259 Index 275 vi
Preface By Gigliola De Donato and Luisa Montevecchi Carlo Levi s varied and prolific literary career (political, social and ethnological, artistic, and critical essays, travel writing and reporting), which ranged broadly over a wide array of subjects (from popular culture to news reporting, from personal and family reminiscences to topical observations on events, occurrences, personalities, and protagonists of history in the making), is for the most part preserved in his personal archive, the site. We have relied upon this as the source of material in this volume, which has been selected from the mass of writings that Levi either chose not to organize or never had the time to organize. A preliminary classification of Carlo Levi s papers has already been undertaken by his friend and partner in life, Linuccia Saba and, however pragmatic the criteria may have been, toward the end of the 1970s, the reorganization was by and large complete. This initial organization arranged Carlo Levi s papers into four main sections: 1) correspondence; 2) documents; 3) photographic archive; 4) exhibition catalogues. vii
PREFACE It is only now, however, following a period in which the collection of papers was entrusted to the skilled care of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Italy s Central State Archives) and thanks to the careful reorganization carried out by Doctor Margherita Martelli and Doctor Luisa Montevecchi under the supervision of the new director, Professor Paola Carucci, that the Fondo Carlo Levi (Carlo Levi Collection) is now fully available to those who are interested in pursuing a more complete understanding of the literary, civil, and artistic work of this author. Making use of the reorganization carried out by the Central State Archives, we have selected various types of writing on that basis. All the same, they have been obliged to discriminate carefully, establishing distinctions within the categories, taking care to identify, among the varied interests of the Turin-born intellectual, often coexisting in a single essay, not only the specific subjects of the various essays, but also the interference or interdependence of other interests within a given subject matter. In other words, we did not limit ourselves to the general criterion of content, but also focused on the modality of the writing, the tone and the inflection. Dividing the essays into sections may seem like a clinical, even surgical undertaking, but we were convinced that it was necessary to provide a structure to the multiform richness of Levi s world, the circularity of his ideas and images, often existing side-by-side in a rhapsodic navigation of memory or thought. We found that the only valid criteria would be ones whereby we could offer an image of the author in all the modulations of his singular keyboard. Only the reader can say if we have been successful. The Introduction to the individual essays, and the Notes to the Text, may offer a useful guide in reading. viii
PREFACE These criteria have led to the outline set forth in the Plan of the Work. In reference to the classification of the essays, we should make a further distinction: while travel writing, essays in historical and political thought, essays on theory, and literary and art criticism are all objectively unified by the specific subject matter of each, the other essays, prompted by specific occasions, have been classified according to their internal thematic homogeneity (writings about Rome, writings about Italy, writings on reflections or recollections, writings inspired by the animal world). All of these writings are now published in book form for the first time, but other unpublished material can be found. Firstly the Fondo Manoscritti di Autori Moderni e Contemporanei (Collection of Manuscripts by Modern and Contemporary Authors) at the University of Pavia, established by Maria Corti; secondly, especially for letters and private papers, the Fondo delle Carte di Famiglia (Collection of Family Papers) in Carlo Levi s family home, now owned by his nephew Professor Giovanni Levi, at Via Bezzecca 11 in Turin; and thirdly, in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the manuscript of Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli) is preserved. In particular, it has been impossible to publish the vast collection of poems, which would have required the integration of two distinct collections, preserved in the Fondazione Carlo Levi (Carlo Levi Foundation) in Rome, and in the Fondo Manoscritti (Manuscript Collection) at Pavia, not yet available or ready for publication. We should add, finally, that several of his private letters state that he was considering making a book out of certain pieces of his journalism (not all of which are published in book form). We ix
PREFACE are referring to his reports from India and China, some of his investigations in southern Italy, and his pieces on Rome and Italy.* The fact remains that Levi never did undertake any work towards the publication of the rich array of materials in his Collection. His rapid metaliterary references seem to us to be highly eloquent, and of course we have taken them into account, following his unintentional suggestions; but we have gone beyond them, of course, in our selection of publishable material, we have gone in search of what were evidently the landmarks in his progress as an artist and a writer. That is to say, we have selected the organic and original aspects of his theoretical thought and his artistic career, in his most vital moments and in moments of transition toward other fields of endeavour, taking care primarily to gather all the richness and complexity of his cultural, artistic, and civil interests, and avoiding, where possible, overemphasis and repetition. It goes without saying that it was not our intention to produce an unabridged edition of the writings, and only time will tell whether such an edition is needed. Our ambition was to offer these writings to the educated reader, enjoyable as individual texts, but also useful as substrate and as general context. We also hoped and primarily focused on the younger generations, so starved of past and tradition, in order to allow them to discover the rich fabric of thought and study, passion and struggle, that lies beneath so many of the problems of the present day. It was necessary to select in such a way as to remain faithful to the features of Carlo Levi s versatile personality, which was also cohesive and harmonious, endowed with a magnetic positivity, a constructive faith in humanity, in a cyclical capacity for rebirth, x * See C. Levi and L. Saba, Carissimo Puck. Lettere d amore e d amicizia, edited by S. D Amaro, Mancosu, Rome, 1994. (According to the Library of Congress, it is Lettere d amore e di vita.)
PREFACE even above and beyond the random elements of historical experience and the harshest moments of the crisis of modernity. We have done our best to bring forth, through a wide-ranging exploration of his work, a complete and organic portrayal of the elements of a world in formation: his path as a writer and artist, his particular trajectory through the reality of our time, characterized unfailingly by a determined civic and political engagement. The various forms of expression of his idioms and the multiplicity of his interests did nothing to keep him from endowing us with Levi s unified and consistent view of the world. It is this richness that we wish to show the new generations. xi
Introduction Eternal and Fleeting by Giulio Ferroni L orologio (The Watch), by Carlo Levi, in the impassioned clarity with which it recounts the last days of the government of Ferruccio Parri and examines the collapse of the azionista* approach that seemed to have gathered momentum from the Resistance, is one of the few books of the twentieth century in which you can palpably feel the breathing of history, the air and colour of a specific time, revealed spontaneously by the deeds and motions of the people, by the physical substance of the settings and material objects, and by what the people feel, in body and mind, in relation to these settings and objects. Levi s writing has the gift, nowadays sadly too often overlooked, of succeeding in giving a sense of life extending over time, of a space throbbing with presences, hopes, feelings, disappointments: and in L orologio this time and this space are the time and space of Rome, a crowded, restive Rome, slothful and tumultuous, in disarray and riddled with glaring flashes, noises, and silences. L orologio is like a novel, * [Translator s note. A proponent of the anti-fascist, pro-reform Partito d Azione ( Action Party ) founded in 1942.] xiii
FLEETING ROME: IN SEARCH OF LA DOLCE VITA diary, or chronicle of the Rome of 1945, of a city in which the countless traces of the past, or its beauty and its decay, open out towards a new and uncertain world, welcoming and at the same time hindering its potential developments: in the deepest recesses of Rome are revealed the concreteness, the corporeality, the physicality of this vaguely defined progress towards something, towards open and interrupted possibilities, announced and frustrated, but always expected, as if coagulating in the air, in the mysterious echoes that spread through it. The opening of the book looks out precisely upon the mysterious breathing of Rome, as if it were possible to listen to its fascinating and menacing throbbing in the night: At night, in Rome, it seems you can hear lions roaring. There is an indistinct murmur, and that is the city breathing, amidst its dark domes and the distant hills, in shadow that glitters here and there; and every so often, the raucous noise of sirens, as if the sea were nearby, and ships were setting sail from the harbour for unknown horizons. And then there is that sound, both lovely and savage, cruel but not devoid of an odd sweetness, the roaring of lions, in the nocturnal desert of houses. I have never figured out what makes that sound. Perhaps hidden workshops, or car engines as they climb uphill? Or perhaps the sound is born, more than from any actual event, from the depths of memory, from the time when between the Tiber and the forests, on solitary slopes, wild beasts still roamed, and she-wolves still suckled foundlings? I listened carefully, peering into the dark, over roofs and terraces, into that world teeming with shadows; and the sound pierced me like a childhood memory, terrifying, xiv
INTRODUCTION moving, and obscure, bound up with another time. Even if produced by machinery, it is still an animalistic sound, which seems to well up from hidden viscera or from maws yawning futilely, seeking an impossible word. It is not the metallic sound of trams rounding bends in the night, the prolonged, thrilling screech of the trams of Turin, the doleful but confident howl of those factory-worker nights in the empty cold air. This is a noise full of laziness, like some yawning beast, indeterminate and terrible. You can hear it everywhere in the city. I listened to it for the first time, so many years ago now, as it came through the bars of a cell in the prison of Regina Coeli, along with the screams of the sick and the mad in the infirmary, and a distant clattering of metal; at the time it seemed like the breathing of that mysterious liberty that must somehow still exist, out there. And I was listening to it just now, a few months after the liberation, from a room high above the Via Gregoriana, a temporary, provisional refuge in those times of change, according to where a providential destiny led us, here and there. 1 And the book concludes, again, with a night-time image of Rome, in which the author narrator has just returned from Naples, after a car journey with the cabinet ministers Tempesti and Colombi (actually, Emilio Sereni and Attilio Piccioni); it is a double image, first viewed on the piazza in front of the main door of his block of flats, and then from the window of his flat: I stood there, alone, holding my suitcase, on the piazza, in front of the main door of my block of flats. The huge urban moon, riding high in the sky, leant down over the architecture like a mother. The paving shone brightly in the moonlight, compounded with silver: to one side, the xv
FLEETING ROME: IN SEARCH OF LA DOLCE VITA oblique shadow of the church spread out the baroque profiles of saints upon the paving. Along the white pavement, a nightwatchman walked, dressed in black, like a scarab beetle. The facade of the block of flats was swept by moonlight, which picked out each cornice, each crack, each stone. Under the balcony, the carved angel, from her bat s lair, glowered out from beneath lowered brows. I crossed the threshold between the columns, walked through the atrium, and slowly climbed up the wide staircase, surrounded by statues. When I reached the top, I entered my flat. From the window, I heard the hour striking from a distant bell tower. I looked out. The city lay spread out, living, breathing, in the vague moonlight, with the indistinct noise of a forest full of ancient trees, barely stirring with the light breath of the breeze. I stood there listening, carefully, to that slightly murmuring silence, and I heard, coming from far away, from the streets or from the depths of memory the obscure sound of the night, the roaring of lions, like the echo of the sea in an abandoned seashell. 2 To this process of listening to Rome, to its mysterious silence and its menacing noise, after L orologio (in which beginning and end merge, in a circular fashion, in the roaring of the lions) Levi devoted the series of essays that are gathered in this volume, and which he himself intended to gather and publish with the title Roma fuggitiva ( Fleeting Rome ), 3 a name that had been inspired by the example of the verses of a Spanish poem dedicated to Rome, quoted by him in the unpublished addition to the article Il popolo di Roma ( The People of Rome ) and mistakenly attributed to Luis de Góngora (see p. 22 below); in reality, this is a sonnet by another great baroque writer, Francisco de Quevedo, and we reprint it here in its entirety: xvi
INTRODUCTION A Roma sepultada en sus ruinas Buscas en Roma a Roma oh peregrino! y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas: cadáver son las que ostentó murallas y tumba de sí proprio el Aventino. Yace donde reinaba el Palatino y limadas del tiempo, las medallas más se muestran destrozo a las batallas de las edades que Blasón Latino. Sólo el Tibre quedó, cuya corriente, si ciudad la regó, ya sepultura la llora con funesto son doliente. Oh Roma en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura, huyó lo que era firme y solamente lo fugitivo permanece y dura! 4 Roma fuggitiva is also the title of a short note found among Levi s papers, dated 6 March 1963 (see p. 235 below): from the addition or preamble to the article Il popolo di Roma and from this note, we learn that Levi took that reference as something like a metaphor for the endurance of that which history in any case had condemned to disappear, that is, that provisional restoration that he had witnessed in the wake of the hopes of the Resistance. These are the words of the article: The fleeting moment of Rome in these years is the external and evident history of the Italian ruling class, the fragile immobility of a restoration, the apathetic succession of scandals, speculations, deals, enrichments, the apparent triumph of a clerical bourgeoisie, and, flowing through the ruins, much like the river that so deeply moved the xvii
FLEETING ROME: IN SEARCH OF LA DOLCE VITA Spanish poet, is a glittering river of cars pounding the ancient roadways (p. 22). And the note from 1963 distinguishes, on the one hand, between a Rome that is immense and pulpy and, on the other hand, a living precious world, which seems to exist within it, consisting of a grey populace waiting to speak, which is not dried out and dead like the stones and the architecture and which seems to herald a possible world of the future. But, aside from the relatively optimistic view that Levi seems to take of the future, it is also true that the image of fleeting Rome recapitulates within itself, for us, reading these pages today, after the many events and transformations in the way that the rest of the twentieth century played out, other, perhaps more nuanced impressions that can be taken from the words of the Spanish poet: as we read these articles, we sense that what was fleeting was not so much, or not only, the Rome of decay and neglect, of money-grubbing speculation, of boredom, but also the Rome of the commoners, in which Levi believed that he could discern the possibilities of a future with an ancient heart, and even the sweet and alluring Rome that he had known how to listen to so well, whose evocations and colours he has gathered for us, preserving all the signs, great and small, scenes of life in which we can find together all the times of so rich a history, perceived as nature, and a present that flows, which in its flight drags away with it the permanence of that history. For us, as we read today, the Rome of the fifties and the early sixties described by Levi is fleeting, too, because we have lost so many traces of it: and because the enduring hermosura, or beauty, of this city has endured new wounds and lacerations, because its features and its social life have changed even further, certainly with many positive aspects, but also with the loss of so many things, so much space, so much light, so much simple, elemental strength. Levi describes for us a Rome that we xviii