The Spectacle of Rome

...Take a long look at Piazza del Popolo, but don't let your eves rest on anything, keep them following the sweep of the piazza and you'll be in ecstasies in no time...

...Curvers has dedicated his book to the memory of John Horne Burns, whose poignant novel, The Gallery, described the moral climate of dissolute, rag-taggled Naples during the American occupation at the end of World War II...

...All the piazzas...

...A picaro in the purest tradition, Jimmy has fled his cold, bleak, ponderous native land in search of his "true self...

...Alexis Curvers has the rare gift of responding fully and humorously to the challenge of the unknown, of being able to watch serenely, of learning to see what lies beyond externals, of catching the one significant detail that spells the difference between understanding or remaining blindly on the outside...

...Friendless and penniless, he manages to keep body and soul together by taking up with a strange group of raffish characters that include an aging English baronet who entertains carefully concealed homosexual designs on the youth and gets him a job as a tourist guide...

...Curvers' characters seem more like puppets feverishly playing the improbable roles assigned to them in the cynical, make-believe, enclave-like world they have created for themselves within Rome...

...Moreover, Burns was concerned with the tragic human realities of a bitter, demoralized, war-weary world...

...It is this peculiar virtue and charm of Rome that Curvers succeeds in conjuring up with a wealth of imagery and a virtuosity of style that make the book engrossing reading, particularly for those who share his enthusiasm for this great city...

...pickpockets, rogues, puttane, gigolos and confidence men whose adventures and misadventures come to a surrealist climax in the wild party given by an American millionaire...

...In Rome you have to look at everything from a distance...

...But this is perhaps as it should be, for they are not the real protagonists...

...Everybody recognizes that cities have personalities as clear-cut and unmistakable as those of human beings...

...are full of things in execrable taste, and they are perfectly lovely...

...He bestows this same knack upon his protagonist, a rootless and foot-loose young Belgian adventurer named Jimmy...

...This gives Jimmy a chance to explore the wonders of the city and to widen the circle of his friends until they include a lovely, shy Roman girl called Geronima, with whom he falls in love...

...the worldly Bishop ex partibus of Omphalpopolis...

...What Rome has got that is really good—and it's not to be surpassed—is Rome itself...

...There was plenty of scope for such a type in the tempestuous Rome right after the war...

...For one thing, The Gallery is a well-focused story, whereas Jimmy's saga consists of a series of vignettes, superbly colorful, it is true, but lacking unity...

...The true protagonist is Rome— the city itself—and Curvers endows it with such resplendent vitality that the sunlit magnificence of its monuments, the dazzling choreography of its streets, the sculptural vigor of its people and the pulsating tempo of its seemingly eternal life tend to reduce Jimmy and his friends to a good deal less than heroic stature...

...Perhaps Curvers' own words about Rome can be applied to what one might be tempted to call the baroque structure of his book: "If you look closely enough you will see very few beautiful things in Rome, infinitely fewer than in Florence...

...the Marchesa Mandriolino, a titled black-market operator who claims kinship with Pope Pius XII...

...Except for using an Italian city as a catalytic agent in the process of a young man's self-discovery, there is little in common between Burns' gripping novel about Naples and Curvers' image of Rome...

...Some are more fascinating, easier to understand and to love than others, but even the most impenetrable end by yielding up their secrets, if one falls into the cadence of their pace, their pulse, their breath, if one ceases being a spectator and becomes a participant in the city's unique spectacle...

...Tempo di Roma attempts in some ways to perform a similar service for Rome, which was invaded by the peaceful hordes of the late 1940s, no less determined than their military predecessors to take over the city and make it theirs...

...Specialist in modern European literature TEMPO DI ROMA, is a brilliant, entertaining, yet strangely elusive, work —less a novel than an inspired travel book—by Alexis Curvers, a distinguished Belgian novelist, poet and essayist who knows Rome as few men do and loves it in the full awareness that it can be as cynical, rapacious and wearisome as it can be bewitching and beautiful...