A single star emerged in the moonless night. I stood for a few moments longer on deck, then ducked back in through a hatchway. I needed rest, so I curled up in a corner and fell asleep to the soft murmur of the sea.
3 And Empires, Too, Shall Splash Across These Pages
The ferry pulled into Brindisi on the heel of the boot of Italy, and I stepped off, having had enough of sea travel for a while. Stars still hung in the east, but the harbour was already alive with touts and merchants. Brindisi is better known among travellers as “Brain Disease.” Sorry, but it’s true. There’s a mind-numbingly long wait there between the time ferries pull in and when trains leave to take you up the coast. And there’s nothing to do but sit around the featureless docks trying to safeguard your valuables from hordes of vendors and pickpockets.
When I finally did get on a train, however, it was headed for Rome, the Eternal City. All around me in the cramped compartment people spoke Italian. It’s a beautiful Romance language that dances on the tongue. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s a language for sweeping women off their feet, though it can. Calling it a Romance language means that it’s a remnant of ancient Rome. It’s one of the children of Latin, the tongue of the Roman Empire.
I found myself a little pension not far from the Spanish Steps in Rome. In a square near there I saw a Japanese couple swarmed by Gypsy children. None of the children were older than ten, and the youngest might have been six. They surrounded the couple, a mob of them, tearing at their pockets, at her purse and his camera. An old lady, dressed entirely in black, had been sitting at the fountain, and at this commotion she suddenly stood and began to blow on a whistle. Then, all along the street, shopkeepers came running out of their stores. It must have been a sort of vigilante system they had set up for the neighbourhood. The Gypsy kids bolted, leaving the poor Japanese tourists confused.
Afterward I sat with the old woman, who I thought was very brave. She spoke a bit of English and told me a story I’ll never forget.
“You go to Colosseum?” she asked.
“Yes, of course. I’ll see it this afternoon.”
“You see the cats, yes?”
I had heard of them. The ancient Colosseum of Rome, an immense building that still towers almost jarringly over the centre of the city, crawls with cats.
The old woman pointed at her chest. “I go to feed the cats.”
“You feed them?”
“Sì.” She heaved herself up and sighed. “In the war Mussolini ... you know?” She made a face.
I chuckled. “Yes, Mussolini.”
“A very bad time. No food.” She looked me hard in the eye. “No food, so we eat ... anything. You understand?”
I saw where she was going. During the worst of the war, the people ate wild cats. There was no choice.
“I was little girl,” she said, “but I remember. I cried. And then we, all people of Rome, we made a ... what you call it ... a promise to the cats. We said, you helped us and we never forget, so we give the Colosseum to them. You understand? Forever, we go there and give them food.”
“That’s only fair.”
“Yes, only fair.”
Later I did go to the Colosseum. It’s impressive, though the area below it, the famous Roman Forum, seat of one of the greatest empires that ever existed, is a rather sad two blocks of dirt and rubble. Only with the expert knowledge of a guide can one understand what was once there, since there’s really not a lot to see. Somewhere in these ruins Julius Caesar was murdered. Somewhere here Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Somewhere here the last of the Roman emperors huddled in the dark with the barbarians at the gates.
On a fallen pediment, however, I saw a bit of chiselled writing, something I could read. The letters were familiar, all capitals perhaps, but the script was as plain as the text in front of you now. I was reading a word that was almost two thousand years old. And then, as if to break the spell, a skinny little kitten skittered onto the marble slab. It pawed the air where a bright blue butterfly fluttered by, and I had to smile. The empire had come to this, as all empires are destined to do. Then the kitten flicked a paw at the air and hopped into the shadows between the fallen stones.
I found once in an old book a fragment of a poem from Sappho:
That’s Greek, of course, but look at the passage when it’s put into Latin:
DEDUKE MEN A SELANNA
KAI PLEIADES. MESAI DE
NUKTES. PATA D’ERKHET’ ORA.
EGO DE MONA KATEUDO
If you heard the above spoken aloud in either language, you would never know they were related. The written text, though, especially in uppercase letters, shows an astonishing resemblance. Quite obviously the written Latin borrowed heavily from the Greek.
It’s a pattern. Some languages muscle their way across continents. They travel first on the feet of soldiers, pillaging and plundering. Then, if things go well, they float on the light winds of trade. After that they’re unstoppable.
Languages can be powerful things. The stronger ones quite simply bulldoze the weaker ones, assimilating whatever is useful and discarding the rest. It doesn’t take long. Even the speakers of the weaker language, or their children, anyway, soon start conversing in the more powerful tongue. People are quick to take up any language that will give them greater access to material advancement. It’s survival of the fittest.
Empires are as much about language as they are about conquest. Today the three largest language populations in the world — English, Spanish, and Mandarin — are that way because they’re the shells of past empires that inundated other languages, drowning them with power. Latin isn’t on that list only because it died in a dusty armchair as a happy old man. It had already given the world a host of powerful children that includes Spanish and English.
The above fragment by Sappho, by the way, translates as:
The Pleiads have left the sky, and
The moon has vanished. It’s midnight
The time for meeting is over
And me — I am lying, lonely.
The train to Florence passes through lovely rolling hills. Cypress trees, rising like solidified whirls of smoke, stand in long, solemn rows. This is the legendary landscape of Tuscany, heart of the Italian Renaissance.
In Florence I’d arranged to meet with Lesley, an old friend of mine. She’s a doctor from England and speaks three languages, Italian included. Funny enough, though, this was her first real trip to Italy. She had learned Italian in school and had never been to a place where she could actually use it.
The first thing to know about Florence is that the name is only our clumsy English approximation. Here they call it Firenze, a moniker with fire in its belly. And it’s true. Five hundred years ago Florence burned with a collection of geniuses the world will probably never see again — Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo. This city was at the heart of an explosion, the shifting of gears between the old world and the new.
It was the Renaissance, of course, literally the rebirth, not so much of the Roman Empire