Living in the Eternal City is a privilege. Walking most everywhere, I have ample time to take in the magnificence of its treasured monuments dating mainly before Christ through the Imperial years, and then the Middle Ages. While Florence reflects the Renaissance, Rome reveals the much longer historical stretch from the Classical through the Baroque. It is also a city of bells, ringing from Medieval towers and countless church domes throughout the day. Columns and other antique architectural elements highlight parks, villas, and street corners. History is omnipresent.
Freud compared Rome to “a psychical entity in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away, and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.” Walls are paved with broken pieces of Roman floors, new doorways flaunt medieval moldings, and every basement is a gateway to the ancient city beneath the streets. Rome is a great reminder that the past is always with us in the present.
Italians specialize in taking their time, particularly at the table where they meander between splendid food and joyous conversationfor hours. Sensuality and taste are their way of life: beautiful people, clothes, furniture, cars, and food. They value beauty almost as if it were a religious tenet — which it was in pre-Christian times. Their highest moral is a bella figura, which means to do something not because it’s ‘right’ but because it’s the beautiful thing to do. Fail that test and you have committed a brutta figura, an act far worse than a mere illegality. As Romans glide through their notorious traffic like sleek schools of fish, they sustain a startlingly low level of honking and accidents because the seeming anarchy has one irrevocable guiding rule: don’t hit anyone.
Practicing the art of living as faithfully as they have for more than two millennia, Romans have learned some valuable survival tricks and still cling to the claim of being capo mundi, ‘head of the world.’ Americans, of course, want to claim that hubristic title in the 21st Century. Nowadays, America is a beacon to people from all the other countries of the world just as ancient Rome was the magnet for Persians, Jews, Greeks, Arabs, and other Europeans who made the Eternal City the world’s first major melting pot.
That the US has a huge military presence in other parts of the world (not for the stability of other countries but for its own continued dominance) is not lost on the Romans. The U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet is still headquartered just south of Naples. But the elders’ memory of Americans liberating them from the tyranny of fascism in the ‘40s may be why Italy has remained one of the most pro-American nations in Western Europe. Or it could be because the U.S. is home to over 11 million Italian-Americans, most of them successful. Italians are proud that one of their own, Rudy Giuliani, was the popular mayor of New York City.
Romans appreciate when I point out how simpatico my home state California and Italy are: beautifully varied landscapes, beaches, and a shared appreciation for fast cars, attractive people, fine wine, elegant living. They and we share something else: repulsion to our elected leader. While it remains a mystery to them why America elected Bush twice, they come the closest to understanding since they managed to do the same with Silvio Berlusconi. (I like to defend Berlusconi, claiming that, next to Bush, he’s a veritable Buddha — he’s against capital punishment, for universal medical care, etc.)
Huey Long, one of America’s cleverest (but also most corrupt) politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. “Yes,” he said, “but we will call it anti-fascism.” My Roman friends seem more upset than most Americans that Bush is eroding personal freedom at home while removing the welcome mat at its borders. “Give me your tired, your poor” has, they note, become: “Give me your fingerprints.”
Initially, more Italians supported Bush than did French, Germans, or even Britons. Two months after 9/11, Premier Berlusconi led a pro-U.S. rally in Rome that attracted nearly 100,000 people. “ Io sono un New Yorker,” he said, echoing the famous John Kennedy tribute to Berlin. Even amidst Berlusconi-controlled TV and state-run media, Italians of all political persuasions observed Bush defy U.N. resolutions to wage an unprovoked, unlawful, colonial-style invasion and occupation of Iraq. But just as many Americans are now unhappy with the war, so, too, have all but the most conservative Italians soured on the Iraq invasion.
Under Bush, Cheney and Co., the American Empire behaves like a rogue state, flouting the international community on legal, economic and environmental issues, even ignoring the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners by insisting on its right to torture enemies. Italians find it laughable that the U.S. forbids new nations from developing nuclear capacity while steadfastly refusing to reduce its own production of weapons of mass destruction. Despite being the only nation to have actually committed nuclear genocide, the American Empire demands it must be entrusted with an unlimited and ever-growing arsenal.
Italians also notice how Bush continues to line the pockets of wealthy cronies while many U.S. citizens live without basic social programs such as national health insurance. The U.S. budget deficit, over a half-trillion dollars, is the biggest bit of red ink ever smeared on world history. As it happens, Americans live shorter lives than Italians. Our children are more likely to die in infancy. The US ranks above Italy (and most industrialized nations) in infant mortality. Despite greater spending, American children consistently under-perform their Italian peers in literacy and math.
So while Italians embrace Americans and much of our popular culture, they may be the fiercest critics of the American Empire. Their view as folks from an “ex-empire” is that America’s Imperium cannot be sustained. Italians see our obsessions with wealth, size, and abundance as not only ecologically catastrophic but aesthetically unredeeming. Italians recognize the most formidable threat to the Empire is not militant Islam but what its own late, much-admired Senator William Fulbright called “the arrogance of power.”
Romans know all too well that no empire is immortal. They are reminded by this every time they step onto their streets where even the grandest temples and mightiest monuments now lie in ruins. Given the Buddha’s teaching on impermanence — and the historical experience that proves it — we must accept that the American Empire will not last. Rome is a fitting place to watch its decline and fall.
Alan Hunt Badiner is a freelance writer living in Rome.