The Capitoline

One of the benefits of living in Rome is that we visit the sort of cultural sites we don’t get to in New York City as often as we would like.  We have the idea of going, but are busy working and assume the show will be there tomorrow, next week, next month, then time slips past and the exhibit we’ve read about is gone.

Living for a finite time in Rome, surrounded by things that have been around forever and will certainly be here tomorrow or the next day or the day after, our sense of time is more immediate and we make lists of things to see and do and actually go.

Maybe because it is usual to do nothing but work in New York, whereas it is unusually hard to get work done work in Rome, we have been visiting sites (in this case, because a trip was organized by the Academy) like the Capitoline Museums.

Set on the Campidoglio just above the Forum with a piazza designed by Michelangelo, the Capitoline is full of the detritus of ancient Rome: classical sculpture and archaeological finds from the iconographic statue of a she-wolf suckling Remus and Romulus to a pair of enormous marble feet the size of a car to a room of ancient marble busts impressive even to weary New Yorkers used to the bounty of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Leaving aside the fact that no building or institution in New York City is remotely as old as the Capitoline, whose foundation dates to 1471 making it one of the oldest public collections in the world, everything here seems weighted and manages to refocus our priorities to garner our attention: from a random Roman column that forms the corner of a restaurant to the starlings swirling overhead in the late afternoon bringing to mind the practice of augury, we are constantly aware here of how lengthy Rome’s history is, but how brief it will be for us.