Roamer's Column

Rome is a many splendoured thing. The Vatican will deny this because it is a State within a capital, but Rome is the Vatican's Sistine chapel with its ceiling frescoed by an artist whose genius had hardly any experience in buon secco when he finally caved in to Julius II's demand to paint the blessed thing. Rome is that most extraordinary of sculptures, the Pietà. Rome is Michelangelo. Rome is thousands of cigarette ends on every pavement.

Rome is the Borghese garden and the Borghese gallery, where Daphne, having fled Apollo's advances and prayed to the river god for the earth to swallow her up if that would prevent him from touching her, or to change her form rather than fall prey to the son of Jupiter, metamorphoses into a laurel tree and is captured by Bernini in fluid marble as the transformation starts, her hair turning into laurel leaves, her fingers into tendrils. Rome is full of beggars.

Rome is the ecstasy of St Theresa of Avila, never mind the ecstasy of Beata Ludovica in San Francesco a Ripa in Trastavere "with which", I was reminded by way of a mild reprimand, "you can establish a more immediate contact". Rome is the colonnades on St Peter's Square. Rome is Bernini. Rome is the column of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius and the remarkable equestrian statue of the latter. Rome is stolen obelisks. Rome is cobbled streets and piazzas and fountains, pizzas and pasta.

Rome is a thousand churches with naves and apses decorated with mosaic visuals that astonish the eye and feast the mind. Rome is the basilicas of St Peter's, Sta Maria Maggiore and St John Lateran, Sta Prassede and Sta Prudenziana and a 'must' (I was told before leaving) we failed to visit: the basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine. Rome is motorcyclists who bear down on you like Hell's Angels and zebra crossings you navigate at your peril, much like Malta.

Rome is the Pantheon, Agrippa's symbol of paganism later Christianised and dedicated to the Virgin of the Martyrs early in the seventh century. Rome is the Contarelli Chapel at San Luigi dei Francesi where we gaped and gawked at The Calling of St Matthew, St Matthew and the Angel and the Martyrdom of St Matthew by Caravaggio. Rome is the Cerasi chapel at Sta Maria del Popolo, where we did likewise at Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St Peter and Conversion of St Paul, the latter immortal in its own right (all limbs and horse) and immortalised still further by the poet Thom Gunn in his splendid and evocative In Santa Maria del Popolo (a copy of which was generously passed on to me not once but twice by an American-Anglo, Anglo-American friend).

I cannot resist quoting the first two verses and the fourth:

Waiting for when the sun an hour or less
Conveniently oblique makes visible
The painting on one wall of this recess
By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,
I see how shadow in the painting brims
With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
But a dim horse's haunch and various limbs,
Until the very subject is in doubt
But evening gives the act, beneath the horse
And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,
Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,
Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.

O wily painter, limiting the scene
From a cacophony of dust forms
To the one convulsion, what is it you mean
In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?

And the last verse:

I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel
To the dim interior of the church instead,
In which there kneel already several people,
Mostly old women: each head closeted
In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.
Their poor arms are too tired for more than this
For the large gesture of solitary man,
Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

Rome is the Villa Scipione Borghese and Caravaggio's Madonna dei Palafrenieri and St Jerome Writing. Rome is taxi drivers who break every rule in the book and fulminate against taxi drivers who are blissfully doing the same.

Rome is La Fornarina, a restaurant now and an excellent one where we spent our last evening - but 500 years ago it was the nickname of Margherita Luti. She was the daughter of a baker on whom the young and sexually fast and free Raphael feasted in between frescoing until he sensed his mortality and disposed of her so that he could die in a state of grace and be buried in the Pantheon. Rome is endless cafes and pleasing shaded alleys with the secrets of a thousand years swirling through them. Rome is home to a growing cult of graffiti.

Rome is the Renaissance and the Baroque, Michelangelo and his enemy Bramante, Caravaggio, da Vinci and Bernini, Raphael and Algardi, Perugino and Melchiorre Cafà. Rome is a thousand other artists and sculptors besides. Rome is the Laocoon. Rome is the Fora. Rome is hundreds of immigrants thrusting red roses at diners and anything else they can carry at daytime, illegally for the most part, scarpering when a police car approaches them, returning the moment the car has driven on.

Rome was humid, or hot as it was on the day we thought we were going to have a sort of private audience with the Pope. We did, but it was with thousands of others on St Peter's Square and he was driven just past where we were and turned to bless the other side when he reached our location. Rome is truly the Eternal City.

Rome was a many-splendoured week with like-minded friends. We stayed at the spacious and very comfortable Hotel Quirinale at the top of the Via Nazionale, just below the Piazza della Repubblica and three stones' throw away from Sta Maria della Vittoria and St Theresa floating in marbled ecstasy. The place is managed by Joanna Fragano, née Mercieca, and an excellent job she makes of it.

Rome is bliss.

The silence of no lamb

The point about Mark Montebello is that he is boorish in the way he expresses himself. He does not need to be; he is an intelligent fellow. Perhaps he should never have joined the Dominican Order of Preachers - then he could have been a carping layman to whom few would pay the slightest attention. Because he is a friar, his every controversial statement receives an interest it does not otherwise deserve.

What surprises me is not that he should have been silenced for six months but that he does not feel within himself a moral duty to really measure his opinions in a way that does not cause scandal, in a way that does not offend. For Montebello's problem does not rest merely with such minor matters as his opinion of Pope Benedict and the cardinal's appointment by his peers (were they all morons those who elected Joseph Ratzinger in the conclave and is Montebello the authentic voice of the Holy Spirit?). This is not the first time he has come to grief, Montebello not the Pope, and I doubt 'silencing' him will work.

Dr Ranier Fsadni, whose mind I respect and whose weekly contribution to The Times I look out for, seems to think that the temporary silencing of Montebello was too harsh and yet too tame. I see his point. But he posits his argument on what he sees as "a response (that) is out of proportion to what Fr Montebello wrote in a newspaper about the Pope". This is not entirely the case. Montebello has been a pain in one way or another on other occasions apart from this and has demonstrated an inability to understand his responsibility to the ministry he has freely vowed to serve. That ministry owes its being to the Church and the faith of the Church; in return some form of humility (no weak virtue) is required of the recipient of that ministry.

And Dr Fsadni has surely not got it quite right when he wrote, as he did last Thursday in The Times: "Suppressing someone who reminds us of (Cardinal Ratzinger's controversial) reputation will not suppress the reputation itself". That much is true. But then: "It will leave many devout Maltese Catholics wondering, as they do, how to square the reputation with the Pope's disarming, charming style. In my experience, they have tended to arrive at the provisional conclusion of 'He's holy, but, you know, he's German'..." (On what grounds does Dr Fsadni make this assertion?)

I must confess that I have no idea of Dr Fsadni's experience and what made him reach his deduction about the wonderment of devout Maltese Catholics. I for one have not come anywhere near that inference but then I make no claim to being a "devout Maltese Catholic". All I can say is that I have never heard from a single person in my acquaintance, devout or otherwise, that he, or she, had come to the conclusion, provisional or otherwise, that the Pope is "holy, but, you know, German".

Are the sirens calling?

Being President Putin cannot be fun, but then it was not a piece of cake for the successors of Mr Brezhnev, either. The head of the KGB Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev but died too soon into his leadership to make a significant difference. His replacement, Chernenko, never quite knew what he was doing. His aspiration to recreate Brezhnevism without Brezhnev made the headway it deserved - none.

Then there was Mr Gorbachev who charmed the West, who was the kind of man Mrs Thatcher claimed she could do business with. The words glasnost and perestroika entered the English language. And, we read in Boris Kangarlitsky's The Dialectic of Change: "Democratisation was to become an instrument of reform".

Since then the Soviet Union has ceased to exist. The central control exercised by Moscow over its republics, from Byelorussia to the Bering Sea and the Sea of Japan is no longer there. Then came the secession of the republics. Recent popular uprisings in Georgia, the Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan have further set in motion a process that cannot but displease President Putin. His ham-handed intervention in the Ukraine, which saw Viktor Yushchenko oust the Kremlin's man by virtue of an extraordinary display of people power, the replacement of Kyrgyzstan's strongman a few weeks ago and, now, the unfolding drama taking place in Uzbekistan, must irk the Russian leader.

The Communist leader in Uzbekistan seems determined to hold on to power even if it means, as it has meant, strafing down popular protests in a manner reminiscent of Tiananmen Square; but how many people must be killed before it dawns on Mr Karimov that there are only so many that can be sacrificed before he is forced to step down?

Characteristically, China, which has become the darling of the West and everybody else who can make a billion or two from trade, has backed the massacres. Not in so many words, mind you; it was reported to be "happy" that order had been restored. Of thus is the kingdom of totalitarianism.

Mr Putin worries about all this. It makes him nervous to see so many of the previous republics going their way and, in some cases, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, walking straight into NATO and into the arms of the European Union. That was bad enough, but now Ukraine is showing signs of following suit even if it will be a decade or two before what was once the grain basket of Europe will be in a position to sit at the same table as the present member countries. And of course Russia was furious to see the speed at which the countries it liberated from Hitler's armies, before it imposed its own dictatorship on them, joined the European Union and NATO.

This is why Mr Putin becomes so testy when he is lectured by President Bush and told that Russia has to improve its democratic credentials. In fact, the American leader was only saying what had been said or written 20 years ago: Democratisation has to become the instrument of reform. Without it there can be no real reform.

The Chinese have so far been successful in allowing economic reforms to take place without any changes in its totalitarian political principles (how envious this must make President Putin). But even there, it is a matter of time before the reforms will eat their way into the political structure and change it They demonstrated in Tiananmen that they were prepared, as good Marxist-Leninists must be, to impose a dictatorship on the proletariat, but as the proletariat becomes smaller and the middle class larger, there will come about the regime change that the regime fears so much. Mr Putin sometimes gives more than a passing impression that he is attracted by the siren calls of the past.