Riflessioni sul Colosseo di autori famosi

G.G. Belli

RIFRESSIONE IMMORALE SUR CULISEO

St’arcate rotte c’oggi li pittori
Viengheno a ddiseggnà cco li pennelli,
Tra ll’arberetti, le crosce, li fiori,
Le farfalle e li canti de l’uscelli,

A ttempo de l’antichi imperatori
Ereno un fiteatro, indove quelli
Curreveno a vvedé li gradiatori
Sfracassasse le coste e li scervelli.

Cqua llòro se pijjaveno piascere
De sentì ll’urli de tanti cristiani
Carpestati e sbranati da le fiere.

Allora tante stragge e ttanto lutto,
E adesso tanta pasce! Oh avventi umani!
Cos’è sto monno! Come cammia tutto!
4 settembre 1835

Hans Christian Andersen
“…like a vast mass of rock.”

Venerable Bede
“While the Coliseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Coliseum falls, Rome shall fall; when Rome falls, the world shall fall.” [Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) quoting a prophecy of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims

Lord Byron

CXLIII
     A ruin — yet what a ruin! from its mass
     Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been rear’d;
     Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,
     And marvel where the spoil could have appear’d.
     Hath it indeed been plunder’d, or but clear’d?
     Alas! developed, opens the decay,
     When the colossal fabric’s form is near’d:
     It will not bear the brightness of the day,
Which streams too much on all — years — man — have reft away.

     CXLIV
     But when the rising moon begins to climb
     Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;
     When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,
     And the low night-breeze waves along the air
     The garland-forest, which the gray walls wear,
     Like laurels on the bald first Cæsar’s head;
     When the light shines serene but doth not glare,
     Then in this magic circle raise the dead:
Heroes have trod this spot — ‘tis on their dust ye tread.

     CXLV
     ‘While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
     ‘When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
     ‘And when Rome falls — the World.’ From our own land
     Thus spake the pilgrims o’er this mighty wall
     In Saxon times, which we are wont to call
     Ancient; and these three mortal things are still
     On their foundations, and unalter’d all;
     Rome and her Ruin past Redemption’s skill,
The World, the same wide den — of thieves, or what ye will.

     CXLVI
     Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime —
     Shrine of all saints and temple of all gods,
     From Jove to Jesus — spared and blest by time;
     Looking tranquillity, while falls or nods
     Arch, empire, each thing round thee, and man plods
     His way through thorns to ashes — glorious dome!
     Shalt thou not last? Time’s scythe and tyrants’ rods
     Shiver upon thee — sanctuary and home
Of art and piety — Pantheon! — pride of Rome!

     CXLVII
     Relic of nobler days, and noblest arts!
     Despoil’d yet perfect, with thy circle spreads
     A holiness appealing to all hearts —
     To art a model; and to him who treads
     Rome for the sake of ages, Glory sheds
     Her light through thy sole aperture; to those
     Who worship, here are altars for their beads;
     And they who feel for genius may repose
Their eyes on honour’d forms, whose busts around them close.
[Byron, 4th Canto, “Childe Harold.”

James Boswell
It is “hard to tell whether the astonishing massiveness or the equisite tast of this superb building should be more admired.”

Thomas Cole
“From the great multitude of wondrous things I would select the Colosseum as the object that affected me the most. It is stupendous, yet beautiful in its destruction. From the broad arena within it rises around, arch above arch, broken and desolate, and mantled in many parts with the laurustimus, the acanthus, and numerous other plants and flowers, exquisite both for their colour and fragrance. It looks more like a work of nature than man; for the regularity of art is lost, in a great measure, in dilapidation, and the luxuriant herbage, clinging to its ruins as if to mouth its distress, completes the illusion. Crag rests over crag, great and breezy summits mount into the sky. [Thomas Cole, 1832]

“The mighty spectacle, mysterious and dark, opens beneath the eye more like some awful dream than an earthly reality — a vision of the valley and shadow of death…. As I mused upon its great circumference, I seemed to be sounding the depth of some volcanic crater, where fires, long extinguished, had left the ribbed and blasted rocks to the wild flowers and ivy.

Charles Dickens
“It is no fiction, but plain, sober, honest Truth, to say: so suggestive is it at this hour: that, for a moment — actually in passing in — they who will, may have the whole great pile before them, as it used to be, with thousands of eager faces staring down into the arena, and such a whirl of strife, and blood, and dust, going on there, as no language can describe. Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter desolation, strike upon the stranger, the next moment, like a softened sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he be so moved and overcome by any sight, not immediately connected with his own affections and afflictions.”
“To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit; chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds who build their nests within its chinks and crannies; to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin, all about it; the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus, and Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the Caesars; the temples of the old religion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked wonderful old city; haunting the very ground on which its people trod. It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand majestic, mournful, sight, conceivable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. God be thanked: a ruin!”
As it tops the other ruins: standing there, a mountain among graves: so do its ancient influences outlive all other remnants of the old mythology and old butchery of Rome, in the nature of the fierce and cruel Roman people….”
“… the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic mournful sight conceivable.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The moonlight which “filled and flooded the great empty space glowed upon tier above tier of ruined, grass-grown arches, and made them even too distinctly visible. The splendour of the revelation took away that inestimable effect of dimness and mystery by which the imagination might be assisted to build up a grander structure than the Coliseum, and to shatter it with a more picturesque decay. Byron’s celebrated description is better than the reality.”

Henry James
“One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one’s respects — without going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing the long oval and sitting down awhile, generally, at the foot of the cross in the centre. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were seated in the depths of some Alpine valley. The upper portions of the side toward the Esquiline look as remote and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you raise your eyes to their rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and silvered by the blue air, with much the same feeling, with which you would take in a grey cliff on which an eagle might lodge. This roughly mountainous quality of the great ruin is its chief interest; beauty of detail has pretty well vanished…”

Longfellow
“Silence, and the quiet moonbeams, and the broad deep shadows of the ruined wall… At length I came to an open space where the arches above had crumbled away, leaving the pavement an unroofed terrace high in the air. From this point, I could see the whole interior of the amphitheater spread out beneath me, half in shadow, half in light, with such soft and indefinite outline that it seemed less an earthly reality than a reflection in the bosom of a lake… I did not conjure up the past, for the past had already become identified with the present.” [1828]
“… A thousand wild flowers bloom/ From every chink, and the birds, build their nests/ Among the ruined arches, and suggest/ New thoughts of beauty to the architect.” [Longfellow, “Michel Angelo”]

Stendhal
“It is the most beautiful of ruins; there breathes all the majesty of ancient Rome. Memories of Titus Livius filled my soul; I saw before Fabius Maximus, Publicola, Menenius Agrippa.