Take a deep breath. What are the chances you just inhaled a molecule which Julius Caesar exhaled in his dying breath? Better than 99 in 100.

John Adlen Paulos -
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, p.32

MAPS

If maps could lead you back through time as well as around in space, the first map that I would chart would be one of the house that I grew up in. I was conceived there, grew there, and went off to college from there. I have never lived anywhere else for so long, and for the majority of my life, never imagined I could feel that connected to a plot of ground, to a human construction. I felt of that house -- as in of my father, of my mother.

OUR HOUSE

I grew up in an old house, the house my parents bought for their growing family, years before I was born. It was an L-shaped, drafty, lumbering thing of fourteen rooms with an unfinished attic and a shallowly dug dirt basement under the front rooms. The oldest part of the house was pre-Revolutionary, probably built during the 1750s, and it consisted of four large rooms facing the street--two upstairs, two down--separated by a central hall and stairway. An attic spanned the width of the house beneath a steep, peaked roof. Perhaps original to the house was a room behind the left front room, on the back or north side--the kitchen. Off the kitchen was a porch, behind the entrance hallway, that opened onto the yard. By the time my parents bought the house, three more rooms--two bedrooms and a bath--had been added behind that kitchen, the kitchen had been converted to a dining room, and the porch had been converted to the kitchen. The same had been done on the second floor, making two complete apartments, upstairs and down.

My older brothers, thirteen and ten when I was born, were still quite small when my family moved into the house, but as my brothers got older, they became the workforce my father needed to carry out his grand schemes of renovation and improvement. The old pine floorboards at the front of the house, by then sagging and bowing in every direction, were persuaded back to semi-level. They tore out the wall separating the living room and dining room and replaced it with a post-and-lintel construction, framing an opening almost, but not quite, the width and height of the rooms themselves. My father and brothers dug down another foot or so in the basement and then poured cement floors. Off the upstairs kitchen, they converted a rickety old porch, which cantilevered over the backyard, to a small storage room; they built a set of stairs off this room, giving access to the second floor from the yard. Downstairs, the window from the old kitchen onto the porch gave way to an open latticework of niches above a larger opening where a built-in drop-leaf table connected the new dining room and kitchen. In those niches, my mother placed bubbly antique bottles and decanters, so the effect was still of a window, now punctuated with intricately shaped objects of colored glass.

Before I was born, my parents rented out the upstairs apartment and the two rooms across the hall on the first and second floors, accumulating heirloom stories of eccentric tenants and unpaid rents. (One long-term occupant laid endless, interwoven lengths of model train track, and the locomotive and cargo would weave in and out through the legs of tables, chairs, and the occasional visitor. Another tenant, many months after moving out, delivered his overdue rent one Christmas morning.) At about the time I was born, my grandparents moved in upstairs. Strangers no longer resided there, and this granted me leave, as I grew up, to freely explore the whole of the never-empty, always-inviting house.

My father's house projects stretched on through my childhood. I remember the years of my brothers' digging when Dad decided to tunnel under the house and create a backyard entrance to the basement. The clay was so hard and the working space so confined, that my brothers had to chip the dirt out with axes; on the up-swing, the opposite end of a pick-axe would have crashed through the living- or dining-room floor. When they were almost to the back wall, under the bathroom, the digging got easier. They realized they were now moving through what had been the hole of the original outhouse. In the rubble and dirt that filled the hole they found old bottles, broken crocks, parts of dishes, the occasional coin.

Colonial trash. After many months of sweating, swearing, and hauling dirt one way or the other, my brothers finally emerged into the light of day at the rear of the house. My older brother, Jack, still reminds Dad that only after he and Bob dug the stairwell straight back into the yard did it occur to our father that the better idea would be to turn and bring the stairs up at a right angle, parallel to the back wall. Then, even after they had filled in the first hole with the dirt of the second, more remained in the excavation project.

Inside again, they set to work digging several shallower side tunnels, perpendicular to the main one, to provide access, at key junctures, for spraying for termites. These were just crawlspaces, about waist high, that went back under the floor of the house. One even doglegged to the left, so the end of the tunnel was not visible from the main, lighted passageway. This little area, at the end of that crawl space, was the abode of the many assorted bogeymen of my childhood. As I got older, these tunnels became mythologized places to play. My friends and I would scare each other by turning off the lights from one end or the other, leaving the others stranded in the dark. On brave days, armed only with candles and matches, we crept, feeling our way along the dirt wall until it fell away to an even denser darkness. Up and into the side passage, we would crawl back on hands and knees, following the dictates of our heathen practices, and there, in the heart of darkness, light our candles, ring bells, chant strange homilies, and sacrifice virgins--at that time, all of us qualified--to the vengeful gods. Once, last one in, I was a few feet into the crawlspace when, from out of the abyss behind me, a hand grabbed my ankle. Shrieks and screams of unearthly dimensions muffled my father's laughter. Come to think of it, that may have been the incident that caused my friends and me to renounce our pagan ways.

ROME

You know the moment. Wyle E. Coyote is chasing along, top speed, in pursuit of the Roadrunner. He is gaining. He is about to nab his dinner when the Roadrunner darts behind a rock and our protagonist continues off the edge of a cliff. He runs three more paces. And then...for a very long moment...hangs in the air. He looks down, looks at us. He knows.

I, unsuspecting traveler, not more than an hour after stepping off the train and now armed only with a map proffered at the station's Information booth, set out to see Rome. What did I know? I had lived in Germany for two years. I was well aware that, in terms of human endeavor, what is old to Americans is merely adolescent to Europeans. I knew a little history. I knew the Coliseum was there, the Pantheon, the Vatican. I could read a map. I would just go have a look.

In the days I was in Rome that first time, I hopped on and off a few buses. I took a few hair-raising cab rides. But mostly I walked. That little map and I became very well acquainted. I loved its specificity. It showed where a few buildings sat back from the others to form a small piazza. A tiny circle in an open rectangle became, in three dimensions, a charming marble elephant carrying an Egyptian obelisk on its back. Who could have imagined? Bernini, I later learned. I followed the lines, the arcs, the circles and ellipses, the angles, and the wrinkles of that map up and down, in and around the back streets of Rome. And it was in those back streets that Rome began to invade my consciousness.

You don't approach the Pantheon along some grand boulevard. In fact, you have to work your way toward it: up this street, around that block, down this alley. And then you turn a corner, and there it stands, two thousand years old, venerable, but snugged in along with everything else. You can't even back up far enough to get a decent picture. The portico looms over you, and you can't see the dome from the piazza. Then inside. On my first visit, I was lucky. It was gray and raining. I crossed the empty, wet piazza to look for the sign indicating when it was open. One of the massive bronze doors stood ajar. No ticket-taker. No guard. Nobody. Inside, alone with the rain falling through the oculus. Alone, with Raphael's bones and his betrothed's bones, and who-knows-who-else's bones. And then, back further still, across more centuries, back to the Romans. No, I mean THE ROMANS. The Roman Legions. The Roman Empire. Hadrian. Those Romans. They were there too, lurking in that dim interior.

I think that was my moment. Standing alone in the rain in the middle of the Pantheon was my moment, three steps out off the edge of that cliff. I had hit the ground running, in pursuit of the historic city of Rome, but all too quickly found myself over the abyss, no longer supported by the once-reliable floor of the twentieth century.

Perhaps growing up in our old house--knowing the ins and outs of it; feeling in the joints and moldings the years of human endeavor it took to keep the windows caulked, the rain out, the heat in, and the paint fresh; reading there so much of the history of our family--perhaps that's the reason I so love Rome. It was as though my brothers had dug the catacombs--as though my father belatedly decided to make the Pantheon round after the rectangular portico was already built. Somehow I'd come home to a place I'd never been before.

I didn't expect to love Rome. In fact, I was prepared not to like it. My brother Bob had been there, and he spoke in disgusted terms of its overcrowded narrow streets, the dirt, maniac drivers, the disorganization. The problem with Rome, he said, was that it was left in the hands of the Romans.

Now, no matter what else I'm reading or researching, there's always a history of Rome, a travelogue, or a history of the popes by my bedside. The latest is a book called Rome and a Villa by Eleanor Clark. You can tell by the language it was written a while ago--published in 1952--she's a little more didactic than a contemporary writer would dare to be, but I love it. Obviously, she too fell victim to Rome's spell. It's one of those books in which I keep finding my own thoughts and feelings, perfectly expressed.

"The city has its own language in time, its own vocabulary for the eye, for which nothing else was any preparation; no other place was so difficult, performed under the slow action of your eyes such transmutations. So the ordinary traveler runs off in relief to Florence, to the single statement, the single moment of time, the charming unity of somewhat prison like architecture, and is aware later of having retained from his whiz tour of Rome some stirring round the heart: those images, huge, often grotesque, were what he had been looking for, only it would have taken so long..." Clark 19.

If you're one of those people who have to get the job done, Rome will thwart you. Getting to know Rome is like setting out to learn the history of western civilization (Hell, it practically is the history of western civilization): the farther you travel, the longer the road becomes. Go ahead. Memorize the map. Take just the area inside the Aurelian wall; the wall's still standing; the maps still show it; the big thoroughfares skirt it. Or just the area inside the Servian wall; it's smaller, less than half the area. You can see where it lies beneath the modern city, parts still sticking out here and there. Even if you reduce the area to a few square blocks, Rome will still thwart you.

What a curious document a map is. Remember the Seven Hills of Rome? Well, they're still there, although not exactly the original seven. On my second Roman visit, my husband and I set out from Trastevere (the section of the city tras Tevere, beyond the Tiber, across the river from the older section) to walk to the Forum. We had just arrived; we were exhausted, jet-lagged, but we thought we'd clear our heads with a short walk.

We crossed the Ponte Palatino, skirted the Temple of Vesta, narrowly escaped being run over on the big streets, and aimed for Via San Teodoro. It looked like a pretty straight shot--we were heading for the arch of Septimius Severus--and Via San Teodoro winds right along the edge of the Forum. We walked up and up, doglegged to the left, like the map shows, and were still not within sight of the Forum. We ended up on the Campidoglio, the Capitoline Hill, having come up the back side, and there was the Forum laid out at our feet, just as the little map says, but eighty feet below us. And no obvious way of getting down there, either. On street maps, all cities are flat. Even Rome.

Magic begins to happen, following the lines of the map of Rome. The map represents distances, as seen from above: flattened, horizontal surfaces only. The hills, valleys, walls, drop-offs are left for you to discover. As with all maps. But the magic of Rome is that it will not let you reside on the surface for very long. All too quickly, you discover that real distances in Rome are not measured in meters or miles, but in centuries, millennia. And that measurement is down. Dig down.

Along the Via de Torre Argentina and not far off the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, you come across the Area Sacra. In the area of about half of a square city block, are the remains of four temples, the oldest of which was built in the fourth century BC. Ruins, like in the Forum. The thing is, they're ten or fifteen feet below street level. You walk along the street, come up to a wall, look over that wall, and there it is: the pavement that Romans walked on twenty-three hundred years ago. Here it's ten feet down, but I've seen estimates that ancient Rome lies as much as sixty feet below modern Rome in some of the lower valleys. That's a lot of rubble.

Or walk around behind the Pantheon: the street out back is thirteen to fifteen feet above the base of the building. Think of the two thousand years of street sweeping it took to keep the entrance clear. And even then, they lost the steps up to the portico to the rising tide of time.

Or take the trip through time at San Clemente. At street level, there's a twelfth-century church. Beneath that lies a fourth-century church and catacombs. From there, descend more steps to the second century and the Temple of Mithras, remnant of a pagan, all-male fertility cult. Beneath this temple, undoubtedly, lie ashes from Nero's fire, which destroyed this section of the city in AD 64. Beneath that? Well, the Dominicans, who took over the church in the seventeenth century, are still digging.

Go ahead. Take that map of Rome and try walking in a straight line. See how far you get before you start going up or down, around or over. See how long it takes before that solid, most-decidedly-tangible pavement or grassy slope starts to give way, and you begin to catch glimpses, startling in their clarity, of some other place, some other Rome, as you sink, here and there, beneath the surface.

Two millennia is a long way to go in an afternoon. And no matter which roads you follow on that Roman map of yours, my bet is, you're going to end up making that detour.

FRAGMENTS

Seven or eight years ago, I taught a survey of ancient art history. I spent a good deal of time on the evolution of style in Greek sculpture: from the rigid, awkward Archaic; through the serene perfection of the Classical; to the emotional exuberance of the Hellenistic, believing that one can see this same pattern, over and over again, in all subsequent creative endeavors. This evolution can be well illustrated in three examples of pedimental sculpture: the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina, c. 490 B.C.; the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, c. 460 B.C.; and the Parthenon, c. 440 B.C.

A pediment is the triangular space beneath the peaked roof at both ends of a Greek temple. Here, the face of the temple is recessed three or four feet to allow a place for sculpture to rest on top of the entablature (the whole of the cross-section that sits on the top of the columns). To accommodate the space's triangularity, the central and generally most important figures stand, and the side figures kneel, crouch, fall, or recline out toward the edges.

In class, we had gone over all the parts of a temple: the pediment and raking cornice; the platform, column, and entablature; and their sub-parts, with tricky spellings and counter-intuitive pronunciations: triglyph, metope, abacus, echinus, necking, architrave, frieze, stylobate, etc. We studied the Doric Order (my favorite), and moved on to the Ionic. A week away, after the mid-term test, lay the Corinthian Order, the rounded arch, and improved concrete. Just over the horizon in Rome.

On the test, one of the terms I asked the students to define was "Pedimental Sculpture." One student wrote: "Sculpture that has been broken into pieces, generally without arms. Some have no heads."

There. She'd seen the obvious, something I had failed even to mention. We have only fragments--a bit here, a part there, fitted together out of the rubble of time.

I had seen and talked about each pediment, each frieze, each temple plan, as a whole--a whole complete, unique, and perfectly embodying the evolution of form. The fact that we piece these bits together, that from these tiny parts we build the fiction of our history, is a commonplace now.

Every age's past is a chosen one, and tells as much about the age as about the history it recovers.. Gracchus 127

But the fact that we know only fragments is not really what I wish to discuss. Rather, it is the way we know them that strikes me when I think about that student's answer.

One of my greatest disappointments in life came in college when I learned that Greek statues and temples had originally been painted. Once I went to Greece and saw the whitewashed buildings, the bright sky-blue accents, the gold filigree of the interiors of churches and chapels, it all made more sense to me, but the disappointment didn't fade. I saw pictures of a modern reconstruction of the Parthenon and gagged at the "cheap" kitchiness of the effect. The tarted-up plaster model of the Peplos Kore at the British Museum makes me sick with regret. Loving Rome as I do, I gladly watch any old movie, any documentary, any computer-generated reconstruction that aspires to show how the city once looked. I love to laugh at the old Hollywood sets and Kirk Douglas in a toga, but bite my tongue when modern historians and artists create scenes hardly less gaudy and overwrought. In dismay, I've seen the reconstructed model of the Pantheon at the Metropolitan Museum, but was heartened to learn that most modern historians feel it better demonstrates the aesthetics of its nineteenth-century creators than it does those of the ancient Romans.

How can we know? Whose aesthetic fantasies can we trust? Whose best guess? When looking at these reconstructions, I always feel more like I'm experiencing a Disney theme park than getting a clear view back through time. And that's the point, I guess. There is no clear view. We need not only dig through the material rubble, but also scrape away and dust off that immaterial filter, the muddying effects of former theories, wrong-headed ideas, and systems of belief. It is a mighty task. But that's what makes it so interesting.

What if the puzzle were solved for us? What if, by some miracle of time travel, we could go back and take photographs and measurements, study the daily lives of the people? I imagine, for me, it would be like having just dumped a new jigsaw puzzle out on the table, having flipped and inspected a few of the pieces, having laid aside a few of the edges, and then coming back into the room only to find the whole thing put together. There it lays--a dime-store photograph of a cabin on a lake or an alpine landscape. It wasn't the picture I wanted. It was the challenge, the anticipation of trying this little flecked green shape against that one, finding out if my hunch was correct: that this brown arc is the edge of that wagon wheel or the elbow of that tree limb. What I wanted was the surprise of seeing: walking by the table in the morning, barely even looking, and seeing where two or three pieces go, right off the bat--and then contrasting that with the hour's concentrated effort that gets me no farther. The final picture interests me not at all; it is much less intriguing than the view out my window.

Yes, of course, I would, in a second, climb in that time machine that would transport me back to the Roman Forum in Hadrian's day. I would love to be THE ONE that got it right: the one who knew exactly what the decorative elements looked like on his Temple of Venus and Rome; the one who could exactly describe the play of morning light in the porticoed garden in front of the Pantheon, or the one who could come back and tell everyone if the two temples that butted up next to the Theater of Marcellus didn't look cramped. Of course I'd do it. I could spend the rest of my life making my own model of the ancient city: interiors, statues, frescoes, and all. But I also suspect I might be a little disappointed. Might the Forum not seem a bit like the Mall in Washington? Big, beautiful, impressive buildings, sure, but not old. Not venerable. Not puzzling.

Heard melodies are sweet,
but those unheard
Are sweeter.
Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn

It is the thrill of the chase, the joy of discovery, the challenge of the puzzle. It is why people still hunt, still travel, still read. In some ways, the more technically advanced we get, the easier the task. We have better methods of dating fragments, more exacting processes for discovering the chemical make-up of material: this is from the hills of Carrara, that is stone imported from Egypt. From the air, we can now "see" ruins buried many feet below ground. More artifacts are being discovered all the time. But each day also takes us farther from our goal. Some pieces of the puzzle are destroyed, some are covered with yet another layer, others are more widely dispersed.

Take Schliemann, for example. In 1871, his years of digging, extensive research, and a lucky hunch carried him to Hissarlik on the coast of Turkey, which he rightly supposed was the site of ancient Troy. He and his crew dug through foundation after foundation, right through the city of Paris and Helen, his crewmen tossing bits and pieces of the Trojan fortification over their shoulders into the rubble heaps. The village they excavated and exposed for all the world to see, it was later learned, pre-dated Troy by a thousand years.

If only he'd had carbon dating. But, still, he'd proved his point: there was, in fact, a Homeric civilization, and he'd proved this "by unearthing the pre-Homeric civilization out of which it grew." Discov. p593. Scholars at that point still believed that Homer's epics were mere myths. Schliemann, suspecting otherwise, had, in fact, settled on Hissarlik as the site of Troy through a careful reading of the Iliad. But, yes, many pieces of the puzzle were lost to us in the process.

Similarly, many Roman myths seem to "bear up" under modern digging. Recent excavations near the Temple of Vesta, at the foot of, or what once was the foot of, the Palatine Hill, have revealed the foundations of an ancient wall, a wall erected in the middle of the eighth century B.C. And the myth of Romulus tells us that in 753 B.C., he stamped along the base of the Palatine Hill to mark the foundations for the wall that would enclose his city.

ARCHEOLOGICAL SILENCE

Is this, that wall? The experts seem inclined to say yes. The foundations of a wall, a hill, a myth. No other clues? Some fragments, yes: the remains of huts and funerary urns, but few and far between. Much destroyed, some dispersed, and what remains is buried under meter after meter of other Romes. Destruction and Reconstruction: it is the history of the place, and is what makes it eternal. But all that destruction, all that taking of bits here to make new buildings there, (the removal of the marble slabs from the Colosseum to cover the steps of St. Peter's, the stripping of the Pantheon's bronze coffers and capitals to make canons for Castel Sant'Angelo, the centuries-long industry of burning ancient marble for the lime, to name just a few examples) has largely wiped out our bread-crumb trail back to the past. It may explain, particularly "on sites where human occupation was constant and where, in antiquity, great building projects were carried out on several occasions...the almost total archeological silence we encounter for the primitive periods." Grandazzi FoR 95

A FEW OF MY FAVORITE FRAGMENTS

Let's start on the Capitoline Hill, the Campidoglio. It's where the Romans started, as we'll later see, tracing their habitations southeast toward the site where now the Colosseum stands, and then out in all directions. Approach it from the front, from the Piazza Venezia, up the ramp that helps to prepare you for the great-sculpted space at the top, the setting designed for us by Michelangelo. Or come up the back side, hooking around on Via San Teodoro, as my husband and I did trying to get to the Forum. There, behind the Senate, you can look out over the Roman Forum, toward the Coliseum, and get a preview of where we'll be heading next.

If you come up the ramp in front and step up onto the piazza, the two buildings on your sides angle slightly away from you, making the piazza wider at the back than at the entrance where you stand, setting the stage for the medieval Senate, which you face. The elliptical design of the pavement directs your eye to the center, where once stood the imposing equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, now housed in the Palazzo Nuovo to your left. (A life-sized copy of the statue has now replaced the original out in the open air.)

To your right is the Palazzo dei Conservatori, seat of the city magistrates during the late Middle Ages, whose facade was also designed by Michelangelo. Let's make its inner court our first stop.

Along the right-hand wall of this court are fragments of a huge statue: two unshod feet, a section of calf, a knee-cap, an elbow, a right hand pointing to the sky, and the gigantic head. The calf and the kneecap have indications of drapery (a toga, we presume), but otherwise, we might think the statue had been nude, unless, of course, we remember the Romans always dressed their statuary. These fragments are, in fact, the remains of a colossal statue of Constantine, which once stood in the apse of the Basilica of Constantine, from the middle of the fourth century A.D., although there is nothing in the courtyard to tell us this. My first time in Rome, I knew the head was Constantine's, but I was not sure all the fragments were from the same statue; the hand seems somehow too large, out of proportion to the head. These fragments, the feet especially, are popular backdrops for tourist photos; I doubt anyone who visits the Capitoline Hill doesn't stop to have their picture taken in front of one of these fragments. (One of the few photographs I have of myself that doesn't make me cringe is of me cocked against the pedestal of that hand, head back laughing, as I look off into the sky, following the direction of that pointed fore-finger.)

Constantine's head sits up the highest--on a pedestal whose top is about eight feet off the ground. The whole head and neck are there, and a bit of the flair of the chest below the supersternal notch (Remember the discussion in The English Patient about the name for that indentation just above the collar bones?). If you placed the top of the nose at the top of your head, the base would fall below your waist. The other fragments are closer, touchable. The hand and the two feet sit on pedestals about chest-high. You can lean on the little toe; the end section of this digit fits your hand like a basketball. The feet are finely carved--you notice the details of the tendons and veins, the bulge of the joints, the outward squish of the ball of the foot, the indentions of the nails.

The courtyard is beautiful. A foreshadowing of the many interior, open-air courtyards yet to be seen in Italy, an architectural feature foreign to Americans, who expect outside to lie only beyond the perimeter of the building. This is an outdoor room; so much of Italian life is and has always been carried on outside, and these inner courts are one more example of that easy integration. The wall behind these Constantinian fragments is beautiful, too. Doric columns and a plain lintel frame four simple marble steps leading to a locked doorway. A brick arch, set into the stucco, circumscribes a slightly recessed panel in which an arched window is set. To the sides and in front of these architectural features are these impressive fragments. The whole wall is stuccoed that rich ochre/sienna seen everywhere in Rome. The surface is cracked, patched, and over painted, giving a marbled effect that runs to deep, blood red in places. Or you might imagine a huge iron facade that has rusted and run, cracked and peeled, and which flakes off on your hand when you touch it. It is earthy. As though the building rose up whole out of the bowels of some volcano. Against this backdrop, the immense fragments stand out in their ghostly pallor.

Pieces of the puzzle, beautifully displayed. Silently seductive. Accessible, yet inscrutable. Beaconing you to follow them backward through time.

This is Rome, and your sense of proportion is undone--the dimensions of space, the dimensions of time. The vast monuments of human endeavor stretch out around you in every direction. Yet its physicality holds you. You are there touching it, smelling it, tasting it. Pick up a handful of dust and breathe it in. Lie on the ground and roll around in it. Sink into it like the rain.

Take a deep breath.