CONTINUE
Like Sorrentino's Stefano, Juan Claudio de Ramón carries with him a briefcase with all the keys, latchkeys and picks that open the palaces of Rome. And with them in hand, they register the portals of a city in which no room or alley is permanently hidden from the eyes of the reader, who turns the pages of this book with the slow enjoyment of those who would prefer it not end. This is the essay 'Messy Rome. The city and the rest', edited by Siruela.
The city is Rome, and the rest is Juan Claudio de Ramón's gaze. The combination of both forges the beauty of this book. Ignacio Peyró is right in the prologue when he affirms that this book fulfills all his promises.
And it does so, precisely, without promising anything. Juan Claudio de Ramón's prose is cultured and erudite, but spontaneous enough to refute itself or find beauty included in the blunt and dirty spots of a city that he polishes with the cloth of his curiosity and talent.
For something it carries the keys of San Pedro, what am I saying, of Sorrentino: so that nothing is foreign to the reader. So that the Rome that he shapes bears his footprints in the fresh mud of wonder. In these pages Juan Claudio de Ramón behaved like a resident and a passerby. Our met in his biography and ours. He walks her with Magda, his wife, a sweet and complicit presence; the weakness of his children for the Roman ice cream parlors or the excursions of those who visit him.
Draw a very personal map of the city. From the EUR district, which portrays "the city that was not", "the lost property office of fascism" to the cementification of some of its places; from the Excelsior of Via Veneto, the hotel of 'La Dolce Vita', where he wants to believe that it is such, to the Rosati, Carano or Strega cafes, specters and evocations of a post-war Rome that appears comfortable in the impressions of those who describe it .
Told by Juan Claudio de Ramón, until the foundation of the city it becomes a fable. The Capitoline wolf taken from her statuary. Juan Claudio de Ramón has the good taste of not charging inks against gentrification or mass tourism, because where some see chaos, he finds a secret beauty that manifests in each cobblestone, as if he had waited centuries for him to find it. There are as many Romes in this book as there are moments: an architectural and plastic story, a political and sentimental derivative, a relay race of beautifully written prints.
Ramon recounts the murder of Aldo Moro with rage, he does it as if something of his existed in that story, because there is. He describes the Vatican as a continuation of the Roman spirit, a construction that turns the old material empire into a moral empire. He begins with the description of a Renaissance house of a Spanish family and ends in the Rome of María Zambrano and Ramón Gaya, both intimate and close, like a brush, a pain or a friendship. He uses the words of the painter to speak of the Tiber, a river that stretches “like the tired arm of a tired and lazy father”. And the reader ends up falling in love with Anita Garibaldi, guerrilla and Garibaldi's wife, more than with the rebel himself. Without a doubt, Juan Claudio de Ramón has all the keys that open the palaces of Rome. And this book proves it.
