Herms and Other Sculptures

While we were in Trastevere, one of our preferred places to walk was up the Gianicolo, or Janiculum Hill, named after the two-faced Roman god Janus, who looked out and in, or forwards and backwards, in many contexts, so that he was the god of doorways and also gave his name to the month of January, looking at years ahead and behind.

The Gianicolo, which is the second tallest hill in the area now occupied by the city of Rome, does not count as one of the seven hills of Rome, because it is on the other side of the Tiber and was not within the ancient boundaries of the city. It offers excellent views.

The hill was important in the war of unification of the Italian peninsula, with Giuseppe Garibaldi leading the volunteer army of the first Roman Republic. After a three-month siege they were defeated by the forces of France and the Papal States, but the cause of liberation throughout the peninsula was nonetheless advanced. There is an equestrian sculpture of Garibaldi at the top of the hill, now shrouded in scaffolding and drop cloths as it is undergoing restoration and maintenance. There's also a portrait herm of Garibaldi (herms are portrait heads or busts atop square pillars that I'll show you instead. A short way off there's a sculpture of his wife Anita, a young

Brazilian revolutionary whom Garibaldi met while in Brazil to fight on behalf of separatists; though she had been married against her will at the age of 14 to a soldier in the Brazilian imperial army, who abandoned her to fight for the Empire, at 18 she met Garibaldi and the earth shook, and she became his wife, partner, and comrade in arms. In the equestrian statue of her on the Gianicolo (not under restoration at the moment but needing additional support), she is carrying her newborn baby (the first of four) on one arm, that hand holding the reins, a pistol in the other hand, as she escapes from captivity by the imperial forces. She accompanied Garibaldi back to Italy in 1848 to join the forces of revolution there, and died of malaria (while pregnant again) three weeks before her 28th birthday.

The roads and paths in the park are lined by herms of many men, who I originally thought were all soldiers in Garibaldi's revolutionary struggle, and many of them are, but not all -- some are distinguished people who had other roles in Roman history. One example is this portrait, which attracted my attention because a bouquet of roses was hanging around its neck. I looked up Lauro de Bosis and learned that he lived from 1901 to 1931 and was a poet, aviator (really still an inexperienced flyer), and anti-fascist; he combined all three in the event that led to his death: he wrote and printed anti-fascist leaflets, rented an airplane in Marseille, flew to Rome where he circled the Piazza Venezia, where Mussolini was in residence, for half an hour, dropping leaflets over the crowd, and eventually flew out to sea. He never made it back to the airfield he'd started from because he hadn't told the mechanics there how far he planned to fly, so they did not fill his gas tanks fully. He died on October 3, 1931, and I saw the dried bouquet on the 16th, so it might or might not have been put there on the anniversary of his death.

In our second apartment, the handiest hill to climb is the Pincio--also not one of the Seven Hills of Rome, though it lies within the old city limits--and it can be reached via several

routes, all quite steep. The park gardens laid out there by the urban planner Giuseppe Valadier in 1809-1814 are neoclassical with wide gravel allées among the woodsy trees, and there are a large number of herms here also, the result of urging of Giuseppe Mazzini, the politician, activist and journalist who became one of the most important figures in uniting Italy. Recognizable names (and some not) from throughout the history of Italy appear on the sculptures, and here's one whose name took us a few seconds to interpret: Pitagora. That's

Πυθαγόρας, Pythagóras, in Greek, where the accent looks as though it falls on the third syllable, but in Italian as in English the accent is on the second syllable, leading us to the identification of Pythagoras, famed chiefly nowadays for his Theorem concerning right triangles. Not strictly a Roman, having lived in Greece in the sixth century B.C.E., but his influence reached Rome. I wondered if the likeness had any chance of being good at a distance of over two and a half millennia, but there appears to be a tradition in many illustrations that he had a long straight nose (triangular??) and a full beard of some kind, and maybe he became bald on top at some point, so this likeness is generally in accord with the other versions.