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Exit, no Exit |
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written
by kayanna / 10.24.2005 |
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Assignment |
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In the Santa Maria della Concezione, the viewer walks in to a dim room. Room after room, there are gruesome and macabre skeletons preaching from piles of their companions’ skulls, scapulas, and vertebrae. Garlands of more vertebrae festoon the low, arching walls. Hanging clavicle light fixtures mark the march of the hallway past these displays to a dead end. At the dead end is a plaque with the inscription – all that you are, we once were. All that we are, you will be. Mortality and life end here. In death, you cannot turn back. Fortunately, here you can – this is the only exit. Back out past the blackened bones of what was once breathing flesh, put up in an invasive display of the dead in the open air and invasive on the unwary passerby.
On the Via Veneto, I walk slowly to look at the patrons crowding the outside tables of the cafes, the stained glass windows depicting rock legends outside the Hard Rock Café, and to eye lamborghinis in windows and water in fountains. There is light, here, unlike the dim, clustered rooms of the Santa Maria della Concezione. All along the street, there are exits – exits to other streets promising shopping and gaiety, and exits into shops or gelaterias.
Taking one of these exits, I am deposited on the top of the stairs. The vista is a reason to stop. There are no direct exits off the sides of the stairs except the top and the bottom, but there are distractions. Italian men lounging there give appreciative sounds to passing women, and tourists babble in a cacophony that ends only in the small hours of the morning. There are photographs being taken, journals being written in, and friends meeting in a public space to laugh and share gelato. At the bottom, there are nearly an infinite number of ways to go – to the Metro, to the fountain, the drinking spigot, the nearby obelisk, the bank, the soda vendor, or the glitzy shopping. The stairs are a thoroughfare from one see-and-be-seen location to another.
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