Let’s start this column with some stuff about columns. For some reason, Italians in general and Romans in particular are – and always have been – nuts about them. Even here in Ottawa, you can pretty well bet that any neighbourhood house with columns and oodles of faux-marble “lawn friends” belongs to an Italian family. (Or… ahem… our local Member of Parliament, but the ones on the front of his house are wooden “colonial” square-post columns, so they don’t count.)
In Rome, columns are deployed for many reasons. One of the most famous (Travel writer Rick Steves calls it “the world’s grandest column from antiquity”) is Trajan’s Column, which sits at one end of Trajan’s Forum. A close look at it reveals that its carvings – and apparently there are some 2500 figures spiralling up its 140-foot height – collectively tell the story of the Dacian War exploits of the Emperor Trajan, who ruled the Empire for almost 20 years at its peak, from 98 to 117 A.D. Most people, when asked to name a Roman emperor who thought more of himself than of the people who made up his Empire, typically will come up with Nero, who famously and allegedly “fiddled while Rome burned”.
But Trajan was no slouch in the “It’s really all about me” department. His column marks just one boundary of what was the largest Forum ever. It actually incorporated the original Roman Forum into its massive dimensions and (again according to Steves) was a Forum with an “opulence [that] astounded even the jaded Romans”.
To build his Forum, Trajan literally removed a huge chunk of one of Rome’s famous “Seven Hills” and had his column erected to the exact height of the hill he removed – as a permanent reminder of just what he was capable of commanding. Then as perhaps the ultimate slap in the face of the shocked Romans, he had the column inscribed with this Ozymandias-like** nose-thumbing: “The Senate and people of Rome dedicate this to the emperor Caesar, son of the divine Nerva, Nerva Traianus Augustus Germanicus Dacicus, pontifex maximus, in his 17th year in the office of tribune, having been acclaimed 6 times as imperator, 6 times consul, pater patriae, to demonstrate of what great height the hill was and place that was removed for such great works.”
** “And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. (from “Ozymandias”, by Percy Bysshe Shelley)
Another form of column that regularly crops up is the Egyptian obelisk. As various Roman generals conquered whole sections of North Africa, loving columns as they did, they hauled back obelisks to present to the Emperor of the day as ready-made trophies of war. The trophies were then planted in various piazzas (public squares) throughout the city. (“Oh lovely, Tiberius Maximus… another obelisk. Put it out in front of the Basilica Santa Maria Soprana Minerva, would you? There’s a good fellow.”)
That kind of “artifact protection” (that’s the politically correct term for it; “looting” is the more accurate, albeit less complimentary, term) didn’t stop with the Roman generals. Crank up your Google machine and seek out, oh… say, “Rosetta Stone”; “Elgin Marbles” and even more recently, the Hermitage Museum’s “Amber Room” and Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1” for some background on other, similarly purloined pieces of national or family heritage.
Sometimes columns were employed structurally, rather than decoratively.
While we’re on the subject of flattening hills to make way for statements of your own self-perceived grandeur, it wasn’t something unique to the Emperors of antiquity. One of the most controversial monuments in Rome today was actually built in the 20th century to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1861 unification of Italy under its first King, Victor Emmanuel II. (There’s more than a little touch of irony in the fact that the same year Italy was finally united, the United States was split with the shelling of Fort Sumter and the eruption of its own four-year long and exceedingly bloody Civil War, but I digress.)
(So why, you ask, is Italy’s first-ever King called Victor Emmanuel… the Second? Good question. It’s because that was his title when he ruled Sardinia, his own pre-unification section of the fragmented country. When unification was achieved, it was after a final battle at the very gates of Vatican City where his armies defeated the Papal forces. That final victory won him a unified country but got him excommunicated from the Church on orders from a pissed-off Pope. One assumes that, when faced with the need to assign himself a royal title, he thought it was probably more prudent to keep the one he had, rather than force a complete reworking of all the family monuments and palace dinner napkins back home on the Island. That’s why the newly united Italy’s first-ever king is actually recorded in history as Victor Emmanuel II.)
Officially, the monument is known as Il Vittoriano (The Victorian, but in the sense of “the winner”, not the British Queen) or the Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland), but foreigners have pretty much unanimously dubbed it “the wedding cake”, and even locals know it more colloquially as “the typewriter”. (In fact it was Benito Mussolini who saved the thing from going visually even more over the top when he vetoed a plan to paint its gleaming white marble exterior bright yellow, a proposal intended to have it blend in with the delicate ochre colour of many of the surrounding buildings.)
To create the land space for the unification monument, a vast tract of one of Rome’s original seven hills – the Capitoline – was simply made to disappear, along with literally hundreds of important mediaeval structures and even older antiquities and, most controversial of all, several Catholic churches and basilicas, some of those already built on foundations of earlier Roman or pagan temples. In fact, one doesn’t even have to read the article when it has a title like “Outrage – the Vittorio Emanuele II monument in Rome”, by Peter Davey in the October 1996 issue of The Architectural Review to appreciate that the monument has a great many detractors.
I couldn’t find any better summation than that written by Kevin Fernando, an Honours student in Art History, as the last sentence in an article that systematically reviews everything about the symbolism of the “wedding cake”, as well as the reasons it is so widely despised: “The overarching theme of Il Vittoriano,” he concludes, “is one of overwhelming folly and hubris; it is a reminder of the Italian government’s historic impotence, and its inability to sew together the hearts of a fractured, confused people into one cohesive identity. And this is the great irony of Il Vittoriano: it is ultimately a celebration of Italy’s disunity rather than its unity.” (The full article, if you’re interested, is here).
All of that being said, the tourist and the military brat in me did find a couple of positives about the wedding cake.
First, the military brat. After WWI, pretty much every country that had been a combatant in the Great War disinterred the remains of an unidentified soldier from one of their own national cemeteries on the countless battlefields of the War and brought him home to rest in a Tomb of the Unknown.
The ceremonies throughout the world by which respective Unknowns were carried to their final resting places were enormous and went a long way to help heal the uncertainties of families with no body to bury, or no known grave to visit to commemorate the soldiers they lost. As astronomical as the odds were, many of them came to cherish the thought that just maybe, their relative would forever lie in the nation’s memorial, rather than among the countless “Known but to God” war graves, or with only their names poignantly inscribed on battlefield monuments as being among those “with no known grave”.
Italy’s Tomb of the Unknown is contained with the monument. From the outside, it is marked by two soldiers perpetually guarding its external cap while the actual remains are encased in a black marble sarcophagus lying a couple storeys below in the bowels of the monument. Like the other national “Unknown” monuments I’ve seen (Canada’s in Confederation Square in Ottawa; America’s in Washington’s Arlington National Cemetery and France’s beneath the arch of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe) it struck me as a very moving and respectful tribute.
Digression: In an unusual (to say the least) coda to the whole intent of a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in 1998 as the result of an intensely researched article written by a US Missing in Action activist and subsequent political pressure, the remains of the Vietnam War Unknown in the Arlington Tomb were exhumed and subjected to mitochondrial DNA testing, positively identifying him as an Air Force First Lieutenant shot down over An Loc in 1972. The remains were returned to his family in 1998 and the Vietnam crypt within the US Tomb of the Unknown Soldier has remained empty ever since.
Now in the US, a DNA sample is required of everyone accepted into their Armed Forces, circumstances which prompted William S Cohen, Secretary of Defence in 1998, to observe, “It may be that forensic science has reached the point where there will be no unknowns in any war.”
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And the second positive thing I found about the wedding cake? This positive is from the tourist in me. Admission is free, but for a few extra Euros (From now on, I’ll just add "HOAWGTBH?" You can fill in, “How often are we going to be here?”) you can take an elevator to the observation deck on the roof for one of the best views of Old Rome you’re going to get without chartering a helicopter tour ride.
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