"No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye." Elizabeth Bowen
I love old tourist maps and pamphlets and ephemera, and have amassed a small collection of them from my father's travels and used book sales and such. So it was delightful to find Elizabeth Bowen's description of her battle with the circa 1959 "Nuovissima Pianta di Roma" in A Time in Rome. I have two of them in my collection. She writes, "The one I bought . . . had been impossible to avoid--pressed upon me at every counter, by every vendor. Very newest it may have been, but not satisfactory. It is large, and I was in a constant state of needing to unfurl it in its entirety. Not canvas-backed, it is printed on brittle paper which disintegrates almost before you touch it. Rome throughout February into March is windy, draughts if there are not gusts, gusts if there are not outright gales: the Pianta forever was rearing up to wrap itself blindingly round my face." She is further disoriented by the "would-be attraction of the Pianta's . . . featuring of principal monuments as drawings" since they "blot out" the map of the streets such that "ways of approach to them or departure from them cannot be traced." But the larger problem seems to come from the Pianta's "contradictions" of her own "subjective map" she carries in her head from prior visits, in the 20s. This map, she realizes, is made of "memories as positive and obsessive as they were faulty." What is reliable, then? "Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather.... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion."
And here's my favorite Rome quote, from Goethe's Italian Journey:
"As I rush about Rome looking at the major monuments, the intensity of the place has a quietening effect. In other places one has to search for the important points of interest; here they crowd in on one in profusion. Wherever you turn your eyes, every kind of vista, near and distant, confronts you -- palaces, ruins, gardens, wildernesses, small houses, stables, triumphal arches, columns -- all of them often so close together that they could be sketched on a single sheet of paper. One would need a thousand styluses to write with. What can one do here with a single pen? And then, in the evening, one feels exhausted after so much looking and admiring."
All of this inspired by assembling the pre-journey maps and guidebooks. I don't like to carry too many books so I do the old trick of xeroxing just the pages we want (supplemented of course with ST printouts--I seem to take more of those along than anything) and discarding as we go. But there always has to be something to read with me that isn't a guidebook so much as it is a good read set in or close by where we are traveling. I picked up Irene Némirovsky's Suite Francaise and am struggling not to read it until we leave.
