The Bittersweet beauty.

In our Rome reading packet there is a poem about the Campo dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz that I feel perfectly illustrates the contradiction that many places in  Rome have.Campo dei Fiori, which I look forward to going to, is a piazza filled with vendors of food, flowers and other goods. Often people remark on it’s beautiful colors and lively atmosphere. The thing about the Campo dei Fiori is that it is also the sight where Giordano Bruno was burned alive. This is an interesting juxtaposition of things. This place that is now filled with wonder, freshness, and beauty was once a place of death, brutality and punishment. I feel as though I may have these opposite emotions for many places we visit while  we are in Rome. A city with so much history has so many layers of emotions, and happenings. Even parts of Portland still show its rough history with, say, African Americans. I think it’s important to recognize and appreciate all the layers and all the history even if some of it is messy.

Campo dei Fiori

By Czeslaw Milosz

Translated By Louis Iribarne and David Brooks

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori

baskets of olives and lemons,

cobbles spattered with wine

and the wreckage of flowers.

Vendors cover the trestles

with rose-pink fish;

armfuls of dark grapes

heaped on peach-down.

On this same square

they burned Giordano Bruno.

Henchmen kindled the pyre

close-pressed by the mob.

Before the flames had died

the taverns were full again,

baskets of olives and lemons

again on the vendors’ shoulders.

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori

in Warsaw by the sky-carousel

one clear spring evening

to the strains of a carnival tune.

The bright melody drowned

the salvos from the ghetto wall,

and couples were flying

high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning

would drift dark kites along

and riders on the carousel

caught petals in midair.

That same hot wind

blew open the skirts of the girls

and the crowds were laughing

on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Someone will read as moral

that the people of Rome or Warsaw

haggle, laugh, make love

as they pass by the martyrs’ pyres.

Someone else will read

of the passing of things human,

of the oblivion

born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only

of the loneliness of the dying,

of how, when Giordano

climbed to his burning

he could not find

in any human tongue

words for mankind,

mankind who live on.

Already they were back at their wine

or peddled their white starfish,

baskets of olives and lemons

they had shouldered to the fair,

and he already distanced

as if centuries had passed

while they paused just a moment

for his flying in the fire.

Those dying here, the lonely

forgotten by the world,

our tongue becomes for them

the language of an ancient planet.

Until, when all is legend

and many years have passed,

on a new Campo dei Fiori

rage will kindle at a poet’s word.

Warsaw, 1943

-Travelin’ Tori

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179942

Image 1: http://www.maciejbielawski.com/campo-dei-fiori-czes322aw-mi322osz.html

Image 2: https://millenio.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/dedico-al-dia-de-conmemoracion-del-holocausto-una-poesia-czeslaw-milosz-campo-de-fiori/