THE BEAUTY OF TEMPORARY LIGHT

VENICE; I was a young fiancée of another century when we took a nighttime gondola ride in the pitch black sweetness of air passing under bridges with sounds of an oar splashing into water and an aria from our gondolier breaking the velvety waves. We had our whole lives before us. (Many moons ago)

We’d be in Sorrento right now, checked into our hotel, he’d go for a swim, and I’d check the view from our room. I’d see his flash of green eyes from the veranda, smiling up at me. We’d have buffalo mozzarella and bread for lunch, and go in search of a cafe.

If only he had lived.

Written in 2018

Cloisters in the heart of the city of Naples, Italy

A quiet outdoor garden art oasis in the heart of the bustle and hustle.

You pay a small fee to the cloisters at a ticket booth, and then have (quiet, respectful) run of the place to stroll and contemplate nature and beauty.

This double monastic complex of Santa Chiara was built in 1313–1340 by Queen Sancha of Majorca and her husband King Robert of Naples, a mix of Provençal-Gothic style and 17th century Baroque.

Chandeliers in Roman Churches, and on being and nothingness amid the Byzantine

In Rome there are so many beautiful churches that the ones that stand out are beyond magnificent. These gems of architecture were built upon layers of history, starting from the ruins of pagan temples thousands of years ago, with places of worship erected piece by piece like a mosaic throughout the first whispers of a Christian Rome through the middle ages to the Renaissance.

The Santa Maria in Ara coeli is on the Capitoline Hill with a foreboding, plain edifice hiding treasures of lights, stonework, faded marble, pillars from various eras, countless sarcophagi and dazzling chandeliers.

The Santi Giovanni e Paolo is built on the ruins of the Roman saints John and Paul’s houses… and their remains, martyred in the 4th century. It boasts Byzantine flourishes, a coffered ceiling, gorgeous frescoes and a hushed, ancient stillness that hangs in the air. It was the first church to be built in Rome and has seen many facelifts and stylistic touches over a millennia.

Pillars from different centuries in Santa Maria in Ara coeli.

Coffered ceiling and ornate interior in Santi Giovanni e Paolo.

The imposing, numerous chandeliers of the Basilica of St. Mary of the Altar of Heaven, Basilica di Santa Maria in Ara coeli al Campidoglio.

Bright frescoes and peeling paint over faded stone and wood in Santi Giovanni e Paolo. The chandeliers appear even more elegant against a faded backdrop.

These chandelier churches are particularly breathtaking in person. They remind me of the somber prayers and cries heard in these walls over centuries of visiting pilgrims and faithful Romans alike. The splendor of the chandeliers and the art-work only add to the sense of contemplation I feel wash over me whenever I enter their doors. I am an outsider on the one hand and a strange, foreign, watered-down modernized product of Christian thought on the other, by my very life in the western world. In America. Because of my Catholic and Protestant émigré forbears, mostly, I suppose. As the daughter of lapsed catholics, I was not raised with church or with any religion, but with the talk of God, and conversely, the discussion of “no god” growing up.

There were stories of gods and theories of prime movers or nature or the impersonal universe as the sources of mankind. There was the appeal of ens causa sui, ‘being one’s own cause’. There was also the fear of that idea. So many ideas whirled around me in the conversations of adults. Mostly in countless old books I read, or watched in old existential 1950s - 1970s movies. Nothing was ever formed, nothing was concrete. Life was fluid. Beliefs were temporary lapses of judgement. The mystery of the unknown barred an anchor, yet my openness to all possibilities was also a kind of freedom. I resent this uncertainty some times. Especially after dealing with death and restarting my life in the middle of my existence (if I live another 40 years, anyway). Sometimes I appreciate my openness.

What a delicate balance in life we all lead. I still don’t know the answer to any of these big questions, or the Big Question, but I feel a subtle change, a quiet shift take over within me, in the quiet corners of Rome. In the buildings made of stone and marble, under the statues and paintings. When I enter into the symbolism of the stories, when I breathe in the heavy air of history, something fills my imagination whilst I am there and it’s hard to move away from it. It never really leaves me.

Old chapel or cathedral, broken temple, an all but vanished sacra, an altar of astronomy and science or art – they are all my churches.

Purgatory Lane in Naples, Italy / off the beaten path

Naples is the flower of paradise. The last adventure of my life. Alexandre Dumas

There is a residential “street”, an off the beaten path alleyway with the delightfully macabre name of Vico Purgatorio Ad Arco, “Purgatory Lane”. I had a love affair with alleyways, you see, and never have I been more sated than in Napoli.

Every narrow opening makes you stop and turn and take in the sights and sounds of Naples. There’s something very beautiful about an alley way, something personal and old, full of secrets and stories and the every day life of strangers. I love the alleys of Boston and New York and New Orleans. Naples alley ways are incomparable because they are places people live to catch sunlight in the darkest places. Neapolitans hang their laundry on little racks on tiny iron balconies. They stack pretty painted clay pots and urns full of flowers. They tie little flags and bunting. The alleys are dark and dank and should be places for trash and death and forgetting. But they are walk ways. They are corners to stop for a moment and discuss the weather with your neighbor. They are short cuts and open windows and the sounds of football playing on an unseen television. They are windows across from cousins and lovers looking at each other when their parents are busy cooking or cleaning. They are the sounds of getting ready for the evening pasieggeta. They are as I had always imagined them: gritty, velvet thick, enchanting, private glimpses of the real Napoli.

There is the foreboding sign which points in the direction of Purgatory Lane. Most people would cross the street to avoid it. But we were different, weren’t we, you and I, Rian? That made it all the more inviting to us all those years ago. Entering purgatory was like stepping back in time. Even in the midst of the buzz of modern life around us.

Kids played football in the streets, they ran through the alleys laughing and dodging each other. Vespas and motorcycles lined the private walks to the apartments. There were surprising flourishes of pinks and golds and soft blues among the blacks and browns. Colors and shadows mixed. We walked through unnoticed. Life was there, the good and the bad. We were just tourists.

Anaïs Nin once said, “I don’t want to be a tourist in the world of images.”

We wanted to step into the picture and become a part of it.

But until I am gone, I am always on the other side of the lens, watching, capturing, stealing images like the thief that I am. I stalk moments and feelings. I want trouble and grit to make something beautiful out of it. I am selfish, a little bit soulless, in my pursuit of another perfect shot. Perhaps the right kind of person for a purgatory?

I chase strangers with the cunning of a secret admirer. I photograph statues like living things and people like sculptures. I cannot tell the difference between the saints and the sinners on the streets.

CineFilm walks of autumn sunset views in Rome / pincio to piazza di spagna

Walking through Rome on my last trip with my husband before we lost him I caught the glimmering light in velvet black shadow as the golden hour dropped into an evening slumber. One of the best sunset walks is through the Villa Borghese park and gardens to the Pincian Hill overlooking the Piazza del Popolo, and then take a left and admire the lowslung sun shimmering on the edge of every object and through every window of cafes, villas, apartments, churches, and shops, and at a later distance, on the ruins and cupolas sprinkled all over the horizon. Walk down towards the French Church at the top of the Piazza di Spagna, take a peek inside at its beauty, and then turn down the Spanish Steps, the white marble now washed in gold, and follow your heart into the city. This moment is eternal. I hope to feel him again in the atoms of the sunshine again one day. Our loves return to us in fleeting moments of life when we awake to their presence there the whole time.

Capaccio, Salerno, Italia and her Grecian Marble of Paestum, a Greek colony of temples predating the Roman Empire

The hamlet of Capaccio, found in the region of Salerno, located far down the boot in Campania, (about two hours or so from Sorrento), is a charming little town near the Greek ruins of Paestum.

There are silent stone churches with slants of light pouring into the shadows through stained glass and open windows shaped as doves and olive branches, each path of gold against black an evocation for peace in an undiscoverable darkness. Silence except for birds and echoing footsteps accompany you a foreigner in a foreign place. The solitude is universal in its unspoken language. You are welcome to sit and contemplate, or walk softly in cold corners under towering stretchs of wood and stone, somehow cradling us in its distance. A transitory connection to prayers whispered in the heart, undecipherable to human ears. How many gods have been called in how many temples on these grounds? Hera, Ceres, Athena, Poisedon, Christ, the Lord Himself, or the Madonna? Outside, a rush of sunshine, warmth on the skin, a grumbling in the stomach, a need to affirm we are still among the living. Fruit and pizza and coffee beckon across the way, and in a little shop in Capaccio we find local juicy figs floating in local honey, and figs woven together stuffed with regional almonds, in beautiful little packages we later brought home with us.

Just recently I gave Rian’s brother that last bundle we had been saving for the holidays… Rian would have wanted him to savor the taste of Italia, a place he’s never been, a place he never fell in love with as Rian and I had twenty years ago, and kept returning to. I gave it to him with Barolo and dark chocolate and champagne, I wanted him to taste a small glimpse into this magical world we had so long found ourselves enchanted with. He loved them. I thought of Rian smiling somewhere as if he could watch us somehow.

Bringing what we loved about this country is something we both so long felt driven to do. He would bring endless bags of chocolates and special Sicilian cookies for his friends at his office, and for family and close friends, after each trip back. Sometimes I would bring wines difficult to find in the states, or handmade liquers, and serve them at the holidays we hosted together for so long.

To share with others even a spark or a glimpse of the reason for our longing and our love for an otherworldy place, combined with tales of what we experienced and learned, kept us going until the next return. One day I suppose I shall return too, without him beside me as I wish, but with his ashes, with his memory, and with his energy still felt in the world, and set the remains afloat in the seas and lands he loved so deeply he broke through the mystery of Italia better than I ever could. And he took that mystery with him beyond. And here I am, as ever, in love with beauty I cannot dissect or take into me, I can only love from afar… as if in a dream. Perhaps life is the dream, and death a waking up? A return to the fold of everything seen and felt here through a veil.

There is that charming church write about above in the heart of the town of Salerno, and also a large cloistered monastery and cathedral, long with a fascinating museum of Clasiccal Antiquity, mostly containing the remnants (some vey much intact) of Paestum, a Greek colony in Italia pre-dating the founding of Rome. It is located on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea in Magna Graecia (southern Italy). The ruins of Paestum are famous for their three ancient Greek temples in the Doric order, dating from about 600 to 450 BC. It was named Poseidonia (Ancient Greek: Ποσειδωνία) but was was eventually conquered by the local Lucanians and later the Romans. The Lucanians renamed it to Paistos and the Romans gave the city its current name.

The Paestum, or “Pesto” temples are some of the most intact ruins on the mainland of Italia, and their being Greek in nature only lends to their charm and mystery. The pastoral setting of Paestum leads one to get a feeling for the atmosphere of another era, millennia ago. Everything is beautiful in the town and most especially in the large park where the Grecian marble stands against all odds of weather, war, and time. One can find shade under tall olive trees and smell hints of lemon trees in the air as they walk among the dead and the stone of a culture and a people who no longer exist, and yet we feel some mysterious connection to, even to this day.

TO VISIT PAESTUM (with stops along the way in the city centers)

click here: http://www.museopaestum.beniculturali.it/i-templi/?lang=en

PAESTUM IS LOCATED AT Via Magna Graecia, 918, 84047 Paestum SA, Italy

Opened: 1952

Hours: Opens 8:30AM (VARIES) to sunset, with special evening extended openings to view the ruins at night.

Province: Province of Salerno

Phone: +39 0828 811023

Below is the Aerial view of Paestum, looking northwest; two Hera Temples in foreground, Athena Temple in background, and a Classical Antiquity museum on right. The first Temple of Hera, built around 550 BC by the Greek colonists, is the oldest surviving temple in Paestum. The second Temple of Hera was built around 460–450 BC, is found just north of the first Hera Temple. At a short distance and height from the the Hera Temples, and north of the center, is the Temple of Athena, built around 500 BC. In the center of the complex is a Roman Forum, perhaps built on the site of a preceding Greek agora. North of the forum is a small Roman temple, dated to 200 BC, and dedicated to the Capitoline Triad, Juno, Jupiter, and Minerva.

To the far north-east of the forum one sees an amphitheater, recently many parts of Paestum have been reopened so vistors can wander through these structures and lands, even walking withing the open aired temples. It’s a wonderful experience. Source: Wikipedia & me.

VISIT THE PAESTUM MUSEUM SITE FOR ALL THE ARCHEOLOGICAL INFORMATION AND IMAGES. http://www.paestum.org.uk/museum/

Additional Cultural and Architectural and Art History and Archeological sources:

CLICK HERE: https://www.romeartlover.it/Paestum5.html

(The Museum of Paestum with images of the artifacts and art.)

CLICK HERE: https://www.romeartlover.it/Paestum.html

(Paestum - The Temples)

CLICK HERE: https://www.romeartlover.it/Paestum2.html

(The Walls of Paestum)