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This is a follow-up post to my thoughts about ‘How New the New World Was’, the first essay in The Narrative of Trajan’s Column  by Italo Calvino (1923-1985). The book is a collection of twelve short essays, taken from Collection of Sand (Collezione di sabbia), which was first published in Italian in 1984 and in English in 2013.

As I said before, I was attracted to this one because of the title essay.  I’ve had a fascination with Trajan’s Column since my student days.  Calvino’s insights in ‘How New the New World Was’, and the next essay ‘The Traveller in the Map’ were the result of visits to exhibitions which were catalysts for thinking about things in a way that was new for him (and for his readers.) Similarly, this piece about Trajan’s Column was enabled by his first opportunity to see it close up.  The marble on the column was deteriorating and scaffolding erected to enable its conservation meant that Calvino could, with a professional expert called Salvatore Settis (b.1941—) by his side, follow the frieze round and round the column, seeing the story of Trajan’s triumphs in detail for the first time, as you or I can now do using the internet.

At first, expecting something ‘Calvino-ish’ in the essay, I was disappointed to find that the narrative of the column, as he describes it, is much like the descriptions of the frieze that I read as a student.

And yet… time shifted for me when I realised that, down among the quiet journals of the Bailleau library 40-odd years ago, I was reading about the visual history of Trajan’s campaign at more or less the same time as an excited Calvino was up on a scaffold looking at it in real life. I was a conscientious student and I was fascinated by classical history: when my lecturer said that the most recent scholarship was not in our text books but in the journals which hadn’t even been indexed yet, I went to find them.  The scholars whose work I read were grasping the opportunity to see the friezes up close, just as Calvino was.

He was excited, he tells us that he rushed to climb the scaffolding, not least because he feared the demise of the column:

This is perhaps the first time in the nineteen centuries since the column was originally erected that there has been such an occasion: the chance to see the bas-reliefs from close up.

We are seeing them perhaps in a perilous condition, for the marble of the sculpted surface is turning to chalk, which dissolves in water, and the rain has been washing it away.  The Department of Antiquities is trying to protect this thin, now crumbling layer with scaffolding, buying time while waiting for the discovery of a system to hold it in place: but we don’t know if such a system exists yet.  Whether it is the fault of the smog, of the vibrations, or just the effects of time, which, millennium after millennium, erodes everything to dust, the fact is that the presumed eternity of Roman remains has perhaps come to its twilight, and our fate will be to witness its end. (p.32)

It is good to know that science did indeed come to the rescue.  When I finally saw the column for myself on our trip to Italy in 2005, I commented in my travel diary that it had been excavated very cleverly so that it was possible to get quite close to the reliefs, which are still in extraordinarily good condition. I wondered if they’d been restored.  Indeed they had: At Arts—University of St Andrews, I discovered that:

Conservation studies and cleaning in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in a greater understanding of the effects of acid rain erosion. The monument was cleaned using a mist of fresh water. Ethyl silicate was employed to stabilise surfaces and a hydraulic mortar of lime and pozzolana to fill cracks (Conti 2000, 248). This has greatly brightened up the monument, and it is hoped that decreased emissions in the city will retard the future build up of surface pollutants.

I read Calvino’s essay again, and noticed aspects that seemed new to me… did I know already that a woman was represented on the column? I don’t think I did.  Calvino tells us about a panel depicting a young woman with a look of desperation on a ship that is leaving a harbour…

The emperor Trajan (98-117) graciously receives Dacian women and children ca. 107. (Research Gate)

Ralph Mathisen at Research Gate, a scholar from the University of Illinois, has named the file for this image as The emperor Trajan (98-117) graciously receives Dacian women and children ca. 107.

But this is what Calvino had to say about it:

There is the crowd bidding her farewell from the jetty, and a woman holding out a baby boy towards the departing woman, no doubt a child of hers whom the mother has been forced to leave behind.  Inevitably Trajan is here too, witnessing this farewell. The historical sources explain the significance of this scene: she is the sister of King Decebalus, who is being sent to Rome as war booty.  The Emperor raises one hand to say farewell to his beautiful prisoner and with the other points to the boy: perhaps reminding her that he will hold the little boy as hostage? Or promising her that he will have him educated in the Roman way in order to make him a subject king of the Empire? Whatever its significance, the scene has a mysterious pathos, heightened by the fact that in the same sequence, we’re not sure why, we have just seen a raid on animals, with images of slaughtered lambs.

(Female figures appear also in one of the cruellest scenes on the Column: furious-looking women are torturing naked men — Romans, it seems, since they have short hair, but the significance of the scene remains obscure.) (p.38)

How wonderful to discover something new about Trajan’s Column after all this time!

‘The Written City: Inscriptions and Graffiti’ explores the presence of writing in Rome from ancient times to the present day but concludes with insights about writing as an imposition.  You can put a book aside if it offends or bores you; you can close your screen if you don’t want to read this blog; but whether you like the challenge of interpreting Latin on buildings in Rome or you loathe the graffiti that today defaces the city… you cannot escape the imposition of words on the buildings that surround us.

‘Thinking the City: Measuring the Spaces’ tells us about medieval Italian cities which were interpreted with an entirely different mindset to our own.  Rome seemed alienating to Leopardi, who wrote to his sister about the disproportion between human dimensions and the size of buildings. 

What causes him anguish is not just the emptiness of St Peter’s Square, which the population of Rome is not enough to fill, or the mass of the huge cupola, which, when he sees it on arrival, seems as high as the Appenine peaks.  Instead, it is the fact that ‘all the grandeur of Rome serves no other purpose than to multiply distances, and also the number of steps that one has to climb up to see whoever it is one wants to see.’ (pp.55-56)

This makes me want to re-read Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1996), an astonishing book that reveals the thinking behind the way rulers have shaped landscapes with architecture and gardens to symbolise their political purposes.

The remaining essays are equally thought-provoking, and there is a special frisson for the reader of ‘The Archipelago of Imaginary Places’ who knows Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

2023 is the 100th anniversary of Italo Calvino’s birth,

Image credit:

• The emperor Trajan (98-117) graciously receives Dacian women and children ca. 107. Trajan’s Column, Rome: Karl Lehmann-Hartleben, Die Trajanssäule: Ein römisches Kunstwerk zu Beginn der Spätantike (Berlin-Leipzig, 1926), pl. 17. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-emperor-Trajan-98-117-graciously-receives-Dacian-women-and-children-ca-107_fig4_249218257

Author: Italo Calvino
Title: The Narrative of Trajan’s Column
Translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin
Publisher: Penguin Books Great Ideas series, 2020
(Selection taken from Collection of Sand (Collezione di sabbia), first published in Italian in 1984 and in English in 2013)
ISBN: 9780241472859, pbk, 99 pages
Source: personal library, thanks to a review at Calmgrove.