Roman-Roman wrestling

How the Great City fell into the center of a local scandal

If, following the PR people, we believe that any response is better than none, and a scandal is generally better than anything in the world, then we can consider the fate of Arkady Ippolitov’s book “Just Rome. Images of Italy in the 21st century” (M., Hummingbird) is downright enviable. The fiercest disputes about her have not subsided for a couple of months. It all started with the fact that in this text, the curator of the cabinet of Italian engravings in the Hermitage, the curator of numerous exhibitions, an intellectual, discovered a lot of errors: first of all, in the dates. A list of these errors was published on the website of the Snob project as a book review, which caused an uproar from friends and admirers of Arkady Ippolitov. If you make a squeeze out of most of the Facebook posts of the defenders of the book and its author, you get this:

“There is nothing for you, mediocrities, to strain a mosquito in the work of an outstanding person, to whom you are like heaven.”

This technique, no doubt, should be included in all textbooks on how not to conduct discussions, and even more so how not to defend someone. Such an action generates nothing but irritated opposition - and reports of absurdities in the text of "Just Rome" flooded social networks for some time.

Behind all this, the book itself was completely lost. In the heat of indignation, some opponents of "Just Rome" (as something absolutely bad) posted passages on Facebook that showed the author's too pompous style. But somehow it never got to the point why this whole text was written and what its meaning is: they say, if a person incorrectly indicated the year of the death of the architect Borromini, then what can you talk about.

As a reader of Just Rome, I'm probably the perfect test subject. Unlike the crowd of connoisseurs of Rome shown by this scandal, I know almost nothing about the Eternal City. The Forum, the Colosseum, St. Peter's Basilica, the Spanish Steps, a couple of nice bars in Trastevere - that's about it. Accordingly, I am the same, according to many, deceived depositor: I paid seven hundred rubles for the book, and there they slip me something inaccurate about the Pantheon and the theater of Marcellus. I'm not going to lie, it's really annoying. And in general, what is there to argue with the obviousness: the conscientiousness of the author and editor is an extremely important thing in the creation of books, “incorrect” should only appear consciously, should mean something, and not arise because of the unwillingness to humiliate oneself by verifying the facts. So in this sense, what happened with "Just Rome" is an undoubted blunder.

But. Do all these obvious considerations mean that for many days now I have not thought about the plots and twists of Ippolitov’s book, have not reread the poems that he recalls, do not revise the films he speaks about, and, most importantly, do not argue (sometimes quite fiercely) with him internally?

To show exactly what Ippolitov does in his book, it is enough to quote one. Talking about a gallery with a deceptive perspective, built in the Palazzo Spada by the great baroque architect Francesco Borromini (partly the entire “Just Rome” is a tribute of delight to this genius, not quite known in Russia), Ippolitov writes as follows:

“Borromini, with his marble installation, wanted to tell you and me, reader, the following: “Dear friend, do you not see that everything we see is only a reflection, only shadows from the invisible with our eyes?”

The Italian architect of the 17th century speaks in the words of a Russian philosopher and poet of the late 19th century. And with Ippolitov, this is not an academic “look, dear, what a similarity there is here between Borromini’s idea and the message of Vladimir Solovyov’s poem,” but a completely natural view: time is a fiction, geniuses speak different languages ​​to us: the language of the ancient order, the language of baroque, the language symbolist poetry or neorealist cinema. The main thing is to hear. And then it becomes important not when it is said, but what is said. The current situation forces me to repeat at this point that no, I do not think that dates and Latin roots should not be verified, but their inconsistency does not cancel or even obscure the lively and intelligent dialogue with history and culture that this book is.

And if something in this text annoys me, it’s not at all mistakes, but how the author is sometimes included in some optional “General History processed by the Satyricon” (having seen the silver model of the fountain that Bernini presented to the papal mistress Olympia, Pope Innocent exclaims: “What do you have here, my dear?”), or aspirated verbosity that arises here and there. A couple of times I got really upset and wanted to put the book aside. And every time, exactly at this place, a late-night window on Piazza Navona suddenly appeared, in the flickering light of which Sophia Loren from the last short story of the film “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” meets with Bernini, who knocked out bribes in a row for the famous fountain, and with the same Olympia , and with St. Agnes, who was once martyred in this square. In the space of this book they talk among themselves and with us, with us too. For me, this is enough. More than.