My Brugge: Memories

Saturday, 4 September 2021

Memories

July 28th 1941 with my mother celebrating
our joint birthdays when we were 1,5 and 7.
Esme, as always, in winsome pose!

To age is to forget! Not necessarily entirely as in Alzheimer’s, but to some degree, and to some extent. While ageing is, in any case, a story of gradual, often imperceptible, loss, as in swiftness of thought and movement, if we are reasonably lucky, the forgetting of some events and peoples in our past lives, is relatively pain-free and indeed, relatively unrecognised by the person concerned. Many of the details and people in my life in my twenties and thirties have disappeared from view while at the same time, many incidents and people during the same period, remain strongly and clearly in sight. Those remembered, both people and situations, seem to be associated with strong emotions like love or fear; many are SO strong that images appear unbidden to the mind’s eye of an occurrence or part of an occurrence, or of a person much loved, not as they are now but as they were at the time of the memory. There are limitless vivid mind pictures of my children over the years; many happy reels of my mother and my sisters when we were young; only frightening ones of my father [who died in 1969 when I was 35]; snatches of children in my classes over the years, mainly of those is some distress who needed help and many images, some fleeting, others more intensely, of friends at different times of my life. I have been composing a narrative of Childhood Memories, mainly during Lockdown when the time was so accommodating, and surprised myself at how intense some of those times and people recalled, were and are.

The trigger for this blog was an essay in The New Statesman of 27 August to 4 September 2021.

Livia Drusilla

In an article entitled, Dining al fresco, Michael Prodger has written an informative and delightful article on Livia Drusilla, eventual wife of Gaius Octavius, the future Emperor Augustus. I have had an intermittent memory of a museum, definitely not in Firenze and probably in Rome, which I had visited with my husband, in the 1990s, when I had been utterly enchanted by murals depicting a garden Paradise. That was a memory about which I wished I could identify more. I just knew I had had strong feelings of aesthetic pleasure from this museum exhibit but that was that!

So, imagine my delight on simply seeing the illustration below in the New Statesman article, when I instantly knew that here was depicted this long-lost memory. I felt ridiculously excited before reading the narrative of Livia to discover some of her life story after her marriage to Gaius Octavius. Possibly a part of her dowry, they had a much-loved retreat at Prima Porta, eight miles outside Rome, from which estate they could look down on Rome, the Tiber and the Apennines. Livia expanded this comparatively modest oasis into an idyllic haven with extensive gardens and courtyards covering half of the area, including one terrace surrounded by 150 columns.

"Luscious with fruit and birds."

Although Livia did not die till AD 29, the villa and its gorgeous gardens were abandoned in AD 5 and, astonishingly, lost for over a millennium, discovered but not identified in the 16^th century but not truly unearthed until the extensive excavations organised by Count Francesco Senni in 1863-64. A celebrated marble statue of Augustus and other statuary including a purported head of Livia were discovered [and eventually lost] but the chief delight was a semi-underground room with a collapsed roof but intact walls decorated with extraordinary frescoes showing a garden in full, imagined, impossible bloom with the seasons blended, luscious with fruit and birds.

Prodger quotes the Augustinian architectural writer, Vitruvius, describing walls for frescoes, prepared with seven layers of plaster, with sheets of lead inserted when necessary to block moisture and a top coat of marble dust to give a smooth painting surface. The paints merged with the plaster as it dried, with touching up a secco as needed. Not a quick or simple process then. The room had measured 40 x 20 feet, and had been a dining room or triclinium partly underground to protect against the fierce heat and affording the diners lounging on couches in groups of three, a continuation and embellishment of the fertile landscape outside. The flora depicted represents “a botanical catalogue” with 24 species identified including laurel, myrtle, quince and pine, all of which had symbolic connections to the Golden Age of Augustus. The range of painted birds covers 69 types from pheasants to finches and an empty painted bird cage suggests that perhaps the diners were beguiled by birds singing and flying around them and in cages suspended nearby. So a feast for the eyes and the intellect too.

These so-called Garden Room murals covered all four walls and are the most complete works of nature painting to have survived from antiquity. They are, as I have delightedly discovered, on display in the Palazzo Massimo in Rome which is where Eric and I had originally stumbled over them. Rome was his ultra favourite Italian city where he had done consultancy work over the years and loved to re-visit. Always an effort for me, Firenze being my supreme Italian city in all its Renaissance glory! But the Garden Room is one of life’s total surprises and pleasures.