Our Pasts Colide

            After walking for miles through the glowing streets of Rome, I begin to notice all that my senses needed some remorse after visiting some of Rome’s most beautiful architectural sites with my chaperone and our docent. After reaching the midpoint of the city our docent recommended a restaurant known as Santa Cristina al Quirinale. He told us that Arrosto di Manzo was a locally famous dish that he insisted that I should try and honestly at that time I wouldn’t have minded a place to sit down for a while. As we walked around the corner to enter the restaurant, I couldn’t help but notice and feel the figures of men and women carved within the stone on the outside of the restaurant. It reminded me of Francesco Borromini’s, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane that we visited earlier in the day and I remember seeing carvings just like that all in and around the church.

 

            I remember how our docent explained to us that Francesco Borromini made this building during the Baroque movement and that the carvings were actually a type of sculpting called relief, which were almost like three-dimensional sculptures but only enough to the point where the images stood out from the flat piece of stone. I looked up at the breath-taking ceiling of this beautiful church and noticed more relief sculpting while our docent explained to us that, even with the success of this historically built church, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane was still considered second best compared to Bernini’s Sant’Andrea al Quirinale. Our docent went on the say that after enough ridicule and from always being compared to Bernini, Borromini took his own life out of shame of always being second best to Bernini’s work. This was a topic that really hit close to home for me. I really felt that I could relate to always being second best to someone. 

                 By the time I was in the fifth grade, my sister was already getting ready to receive her Masters degree from USC and everyday I was reminded of her success rather then of my own whenever it might come around. My mother would tell me how my sister would always make the honor roll and would always get the highest grades out of her class when she was my age. Hearing that only made me sad, because I was never that “smart kid” in class and I would never make honor roll in grade school. There were times when I wanted to just give up, but I knew that I didn’t have a choice but to just keep going on and just hope that the next grade I got would be an A, so that maybe my mother would be proud of me. If I had been there during Borromini’s time, I would have told him that his architecture shouldn’t be made just for peoples approval. It should be made because you see a thing of beauty in your mind and you want others to see it too. I would tell him that no one could do you better then you can. The same way I got over my issue with always being compared to my sister, so should you get over everyone comparing you to Bernini, and right before our waitress set down our plates I thought, “wow, it’s funny how just touching a little relief on stone can bring some relief in life” and I think Borromini would have liked to have heard that.

Devin Hunter