The Secrets of Rome: Love and Death in the Eternal City
Corrado Augias
Language: English
Pages: 406
ISBN: 0847842762
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From Italy's popular author Corrado Augias comes the most intriguing exploration of Rome ever to be published. In the mold of his earlier histories of Paris, New York, and London, Augias moves perceptively through twenty-seven centuries of Roman life, shedding new light on a cast of famous, and infamous, historical figures and uncovering secrets and conspiracies that have shaped the city without our ever knowing it. From Rome's origins as Romulus's stomping ground to the dark atmosphere of the Middle Ages; from Caesar's unscrupulousness to Caravaggio's lurid genius; from the notorious Lucrezia Borgia to the seductive Anna Fallarino, the marchioness at the center of one of Rome's most heinous crimes of the post-war period, Augias creates a sweeping account of the passions that have shaped this complex city: at once both a metropolis and a village, where all human sentiment-bravery and cowardice, industriousness and sloth, enterprise and laxity-find their interpreters and stage. If the history of humankind is all passion and uproar, then, as the author notes, "for centuries Rome has been the mirror of this history, reflecting with excruciating accuracy every detail, even those that might cause you to avert your gaze."
troops of Charles V entered the city and committed every sort of violence and plundering. It was without doubt an atrocious event, especially in terms of lives lost. Nonetheless, considering the broader point of view of the ancient city and what survived of the imperial capital’s greatness, May of 1084 was immeasurably worse. In 1527 the new Rome, tied to the splendor of the Vatican and the magnificence of the Renaissance artists, had already been born and was flourishing. In the abysmal darkness
deer, roebucks, and wild boars. A locked gun case stood in one corner, full of well-oiled, shiny shotguns ready for use. On August 30, 1970, the day of the crime, police officer Domenico Scali was one of the first to enter the apartment, and described what he saw in an interview: “The first body I saw was Anna Fallarino’s. It looked as if she were still alive, sitting on a sofa with her legs crossed on a footstool. Her hands were in her lap, and her face looked serene. The part that was wrong
few, include the Gil House in Trastevere, the Casa delle Armi, and Mussolini’s gymnasium at the Foro Italico. The Casa delle Armi—also known as the Palazzina della Scherma, for the fencing tournaments held inside—was destroyed in the nineteen-seventies when it was converted into a courtroom for high-profile trials. The numerous protests, imprecations, and reminders that the building was one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Italian architecture were all for naught. Finally, in the first
D’Annunzio himself was its director (1885–1886). They do, on the other hand, include the slim volume by the antiquarian Alberto Arduini with the winning title Dame al Macao, first published in 1945 and never reprinted. But why the name Macao? What does Rome have to do with the former Portuguese colony in the South China Sea, long considered a place of “belle dame sans merci” and exotic adventures? The neighborhood’s name was actually taken from a Jesuit seminary built on a part of the Castro
the bed linens and stealing even the box of poison.” He then sought out someone to kill him, but couldn’t find even that. Suetonius wrote: Phaon, an Imperial freedman, suggested his own suburban villa, four miles away, between the Nomentanan and the Salarian Ways. Nero jumped at the offer. He was in undershirt and slippers; but simply pulled on a faded cloak and hat, took horse and trotted off, holding a handkerchief over his face. Four servants went with him, including Sporus.25 The haggard