Mantua me genuit...

Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces…
(Mantua begot me, Calabria stole me away, Parthenope has me now; I sang of pastures, countryside and commanders.)

I keep forgetting that Mantua is the ancestral home of my favorite poet. Well, one of my favorite poets. My favorite Roman poet, at any rate—not counting Ovid or Catullus. Vergil is perhaps my intellectual favorite, or my historical-political favorite; before I read Vergil it never occurred to me that poetics and politics might intersect, or that their junction could ever prove a valuable site of inquiry. Since then I’ve not only learned to accept political philosophy as a component of literary production and criticism, but I’ve found that I can hardly read anything without considering the politics of the author’s milieu. I first read Vergil as a college freshman, and the professor who taught that class was the first person to suggest that I consider graduate school in the humanities. So in some ways I have Vergil to thank for my presence in Italy this month!


I took the above photo on my last trip to Italy, six years ago. Vergil’s tomb is outside of Naples, and I’m not going there this time. But there is also a monument to Vergil in Mantova, and since it lay along our walking path from the train station to the historic center of town, we had to pay a visit:


Verona, as I’ve mentioned, has a bit of a preoccupation with the Romeo and Juliet story, which is understandable, because aside from the romance of the narrative, it fuels tourism to the city! So around here, when someone mentions Mantua—or Mantova, more properly—to a tourist, the next sentence is always: “You know, where Romeo was exiled to.” But I wanted to visit Mantova in order to tour the Palazzo Ducale, the stronghold of the Gonzaga family from the mid-fourteenth century to the turn of the eighteenth. At school last year I had the opportunity to study some of the writings of Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), who was married to Francesco II Gonzaga (1466-1519). Isabella d’Este’s letters are filled with details of palace life, and I was eager to see where they had been written. Unfortunately, photography is not permitted inside the Palazzo, nor on the grounds:


(no, of course neither of us wrote that! we are much too well behaved, but we shared the sentiment... I would have photographed every inch of the palace if I could.) But here’s a view of the fourteenth-century façade from across the Piazza Sordello:


Before we went in, we had to take a gelato break. It was unbearably warm. At the Monumento Virgiliana there were no tourists, but a bunch of local kids playing in a fountain. We were very sad that we were too grown up to join them (or at least we had to pretend to behave like grownups). But one is never too grown up to enjoy some ice cream. We even had grown-up flavors: lemon (not too sweet, very refreshing) and fig (creamy, intensely figgy).


The Palazzo is a sprawling, labyrinthine construction. The palace of Isabella’s time was grand enough, but every subsequent generation of Gonzaga dukes added an extension, until by the mid-seventeenth century the Palazzo had effectively become a small town, with church, courtyards and gardens enclosed within its many expansive wings. Many of the palace walls are painted with trompe l’oeuil frescoes that give the effect of multicolored marble paneling; others are painted with geometric designs, or hung with extraordinary Flemish tapestries. The Zodiac Room, its ceiling painted with constellations, has walls papered over in a luxurious green-and-gold brocade. One of the grand halls had a rather puzzling motif painted around the walls just below the ceiling: a series of panels, each of a curtain partly drawn back to reveal horses’ hooves, in various positions. The description in the museum merely stated, “horses behind tents” and declined to explain why this motif was chosen or what it signified. Something to look up, I guess. The most celebrated room in the palace is the Camera degli Sposi, or bridal chamber, painted in 1465 with a series of frescoes by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), depicting several groupings of Gonzaga family members.

Crossing the Piazza Sordello on our way out of the Palazzo, I spotted a big black structure with the words MANTUA ME GENUIT printed on one of its walls. An official-looking gentleman in a suit and tie was standing in front of the door, as if guarding it, so I asked him what it was. The structure turned out to be a shelter for an archeological exhibit: an ancient Roman house was being unearthed here, in the piazza. Inside were several square meters of intact mosaic floor. The exhibit was due to close for the day in a view minutes, but the docent graciously ushered us in for a quick look. And he wouldn’t let us pay! Che galantuomo. It may have been because he was lazy—he wasn’t sitting at the ticket desk at that moment, after all—but I like to think it was because he was charmed by how my face lit up at the mention of Roman antiquities.



The next stop on our itinerary was the Teatro Bibiena, an eighteenth-century theater around the corner from the Palazzo. Sadly, it was closed for a film shoot; no visitors allowed. By then it was after 6PM (we had arrived in Mantova much later than planned, thanks to the utter confusion of the Verona train station), and by the time we could walk to the next sightseeing destination, it would be about to close. So instead we opted to do a little food tourism.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Verona Storica

Yesterday was the first of our weekly excursions into town with the school’s resident art historian, Andrea, whose enthusiasm for his city and its history is unbounded and contagious. Today’s lesson was “Verona Romana,” a walking tour of the remains of the ancient Roman city. Here’s a little bit of what we saw:


A reconstruction of a Roman triumphal arch, that used be across the street from its present location. It was dismantled in the 19th century and reconstructed under Mussolini; the present-day structure is about thirty percent original to the Roman era, the rest is modern (you can see, for example, the difference between the ancient eroded capitol on the second column from the left, and the replica capitols on the columns flanking it). The chief architect’s inscription survives: L VITRVVIVS ARCHITECTVS, that is, the freedman of Vitruvius, architect. Vitruvius, in case you’re not up on your Roman history, was the author of a series of ten books on architecture; this arch was constructed by his former slave and pupil.

Under the arch runs a section of the original Roman road that connected Verona to Mediolanum (Milan). Look closely at the granite cobblestones and you can see the wheel ruts created by centuries of traffic:


Because I’m a total nerd I just had to take a photo of Via Valerio Catullo (Catullus Street).

The carving in the wall below it is a Medusa head from a Roman sarcophagus. Andrea told us that the women of Verona have a saying, based on their two most famous romantic heroines, Juliet and Catullus’s lover Lesbia (we’ll overlook the fact that she was not in fact Veronese, but came from a prominent Roman family): Meglio tradire di morire. That is, better to betray your lover (Lesbia’s unfaithfulness is well documented in verse) than to die for love as Juliet and Romeo did. Please don’t think me callous, but I tend to agree with these Veronese women. I have no tolerance for any degree of infidelity, but on the other hand, I have to confess that I can’t imagine a romantic love affair worth dying for. Speaking of which:


This charming plaque commemorates the spot where, supposedly, Romeo and Tybalt fought their fatal duel. It’s right across from the Porta Borsari, the Roman city gate:


All visitors to the city had to enter through this gate; the buildings on either side of it used to be guard towers, where soldiers kept a strategic eye on the comings-and-goings below. The Porta Borsari is named for the borsa (money-purse) carried by an official who questioned each visitor as to his purpose. If he was entering the city to pray at the temple, or to visit a friend or patron, he could enter gratis, but if he was going in to do business—for example, a farmer going to sell his produce in the Forum—he would have to pay a tax, which the borsari tucked away into their money bags.

I walk through the Porta Borsari almost every day, on my way two or from school. My neighborhood is in the centro storico, or the historic city center; Piazza Erbe, the big square around the corner where I buy my fruits and vegetables, is where the Forum was located two thousand years ago. Now, in addition to the market, it’s lined with shops and restaurants; the buildings cover an enormous span of architectural eras, built between the middle ages and the nineteenth century. In the center of the piazza is a fountain that in the Roman era supported a statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom; in the fourteenth century it was reimagined as Madonna Verona, the city personified.


Just behind Piazza Erbe is the Piazza dei Signori, which I’ve also heard referred to as Piazza Dante, because of this lovely statue:


Just behind our Florentine friend, you can see a statue of a man carrying a sphere, standing on top of an arch. That’s a portrait of a Veronese astronomer whose name I’m ashamed to admit I’ve already forgotten. Since the statue was erected, legend had it that the sphere would drop from the astronomer’s hands if a truly honest person ever walked under that arch. But since last year, when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi traipsed under there with his teenaged girlfriend, the legend has been adjusted: that sphere will never fall!