There are many views in Rome I can’t resist taking photos of almost every single time I see them, and lots of them are in or around the Parco Archeologico del Colosseo. They’re not always the same—light changes; seasons come and go—but they all share the elegant melancholy of a once invincible civilisation ultimately thwarted. Bell towers rise amid ruined temples; columns quarried in other continents and brought here in triumph languish in the dust. At every turn a vignette framed by umbrella pines and arches illustrates Shelley’s 1818 poem Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Here it is, read in the inimitable and dulcet tones of Sir John Gielgud:
There’s the view which is lurking beneath the chaotic flurry of documents on the desktop of my computer which is from the Palatine looking towards the Caelian Hill.
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