Rome Wasn't Built in a Day

Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis Museum: modern on the outside, ancient on the inside.

Everything in Italy, a Roman told me, is politics. He was talking about architect Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis Museum, the first significant building to go up within Rome’s ancient walls in more than 50 years. It is a glaringly modern creation amid all that Baroque architecture. The city’s right-of-centre mayor, Gianni Alemanno, declared it “a disfigurement in the heart of Rome” and “an act of intellectual arrogance against the citizens,” and announced that he would tear it down.

Standing in Meier’s elegant structure, looking out through its glass walls at the historical buildings that flank it, I could see a Baroque church and the huge 2,000-year-old tomb of Emperor Augustus. It’s true the museum doesn’t make many concessions to the site, its Modernist lines at odds with everything around it. It didn’t help that the museum was designed by an American and that the commission was originally awarded by a left-wing mayor.

Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis Museum.

Still, while Meier’s building is flawed, as local architect Paolo Desideri told me, Rome needs modern buildings. “Otherwise,” he said, “the city will become a museum, a kind of Disneyland for people to come and take pictures.” There was evidence of this the day before, in front of the Colosseum, where a Fabio-looking guy dressed as a gladiator was charging for photographs, standing with his toy sword and blond highlights, exhorting the crowd. “C’mon, I’m the man,” he said. “I’m a sex machine.”

Meier vs. Alemanno isn’t the city’s first architectural tiff. Rome was built on conflict: It used to be popes that came and went, the equivalent of today’s left- and right-wing mayors, favouring architects they liked. Much of the Baroque architecture that Alemanno favours is the result of a rivalry between two architects, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and Francesco Borromini (1599–1667). They gave Rome extraordinary churches, fountains and sculptures, and the two fought bitterly and publicly until Borromini’s death.

The rivalry began at the Vatican in 1624 when both were employed to work on St. Peter’s Basilica. My wife, Grazyna, and I walked to St. Peter’s to view it firsthand – it was raining, and the swift, caramel-coloured water of the Tiber River was filled with branches and debris. The mammoth Piazza San Pietro, which was laid out by Bernini, was a sea of umbrellas. The two architects worked for nine years together at the epicentre of Catholicism, developing their architectural styles (Bernini’s dramatic and emotional, Borromini’s mathematical and progressive) and their dislike for each other.

I trailed behind my wife and her lapsed Catholicism, through the labyrinthine hallways that led, finally, to the Sistine Chapel, where an usher scurried over to a teenager whose awe was too loud.

“Silenzio.”

“Whatever.”