The Road to Rome

Ljubljana at half past four in the morning. I drive slowly through the almost empty city. I am catching the first morning flight from Trieste’s Ronchi airport to Rome, where the Italian presidency of the G20, the forum of the world’s twenty largest economies, has organized the first meeting of culture ministers in the history of the group. What does culture have to do with the economy? Quite a lot, but more on that later. At Dolgi most I turn left onto the motorway heading west. How many times we drove this route with my parents, going back from Ljubljana to Trieste, where I spent the first years of my life. Except that back then there was no motorway, of course; we carried on along that narrow, winding asphalt track connecting Ljubljana with Trieste, and Istanbul with Paris. The Orient Express, in a Fiat 124. Now and then, traffic jams on the Primorska motorway allow me to relive those endless drives across Notranjska and the Karst to the sea. This time the motorway is more or less empty, thank God, as I don’t have much time before my flight.

A good twenty minutes later I drive past Unec, which is of course a very important place. That is exactly where the Rapallo border ran, drawn after the First World War. And because it was the first place in the old Yugoslavia, it was there that my grandfather Vlado and his younger sister Ivanka fled from Nabrežina at the end of the 1920s. They were driven out by the fascists, who wanted to pour respect for the Italian state, culture and civilization into them with castor oil. Almost a hundred years later, his grandson is driving in the opposite direction to talk with Italians about culture and its role in society. A paradox? Not at all. The initiative of the Italian minister Dario Franceschini places culture and cultural heritage in a context diametrically opposed to the one used by the Duce and his blackshirts. In the middle of the large round table at which we sat during the opening session in Rome’s Colosseum was written: “Culture unites people.” For him, and for most of the other participants—I wouldn’t dare claim it categorically for all of them—culture is not an instrument for creating an exclusionary, nationalist identity, nor a uniform by which you recognize your own and your enemies in the populist culture war. Culture, art and cultural heritage are a creative, transformative force that not only generates economic growth and jobs but also brings to society innovation, reflection, an understanding of the past and present, and the search for the new. In Rome we talked about culture that does not separate people but opens them up to one another.

At Unec, my grandfather managed to escape the fascists, at least for a while, and it was there that he met my grandmother, who came from one of the wealthiest families in the village. In Rakek they built a bourgeois villa, just a stone’s throw from the Church of the Sacred Heart, which Jože Plečnik renovated a few years later. Of all that wealth, nothing was left to us after the war. It is true, though, that, as far as I know, unlike many others, nothing of ours was nationalized. My grandfather had many excellent qualities; he knew everything about forests, knew every blade of grass, made the most beautiful little water mills and whistles out of bark, but he was no great shakes at business. When the political commissars came, there was precious little left to seize. He managed to pass his complete lack of business acumen on to my father, and I haven’t fallen far from his tree either. But money worries were of the least importance. A few years after arriving in Unec, at the end of May 1932, on the day of my father’s christening, Ivanka was shot by a jealous border guard, Djordje, because she had fallen in love with someone else. Her new beloved, Jože, after the tragic death of his sweetheart, took refuge in a wooden shed outside the village, where he was found dead the next day. He had taken his own life. So did the murderer, who succumbed to his wounds in the military hospital in Ljubljana. “Three deaths in a love tragedy near Rakek” was the headline of an article published in the Ljubljana daily Jutro on May 25. “A terrible tragedy at Rakek,” the newspaper Slovenec had written the day before, concluding that it was all the fault of “the disarray of today’s youth, who find no refuge or support anywhere. Parents, take care and watch where your children go and with whom they associate.” In my family we didn’t write tragedies and dramas; we staged them.

From the old Rapallo border to today’s state border is a little under half an hour on the motorway. I cross it at Fernetiči. If I had more time, I would take the old road from here. Not the coastal costiera, but that narrow asphalt road winding through the Karst villages. Each of them holds a memory of moments spent with my father, who has been gone for 14 years now. From the motorway I still catch a brief glimpse of the houses of Nabrežina, high on the cliff above the sea. Below is Duino Castle, a symbol of power and luxury; above it the village where Slovenian stonemasons and fishermen lived, who watered every stone of the luxurious building with their sweat, the building in which Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his elegies. Until a few decades ago, you could still stop at the Bar Gruden in Nabrežina. My family really wasn’t cut out for business; hospitality was the only exception. My grandmother, the one from the wealthy family in Unec, was also manager of the Bežigrad café before she retired. Today they sell bicycles there.

A few minutes later I am at Ronchi airport, or Ronchi dei Legionari, as the Italians call it. Trieste airport is one of the few that seem even smaller and more deserted than Ljubljana’s. The plane that took us to Rome was stylistically in keeping with the airport. The cabin smelled of cigarette smoke. I hope they maintain it better than they clean it, I thought, and closed my eyes. In a few months, Alitalia will be no more. It is supposedly being replaced by a new airline, ITA. I wish it the best of luck. The Italians have a phenomenal culture and cultural heritage, they make beautiful cars, but they evidently aren’t born for the airline business. Like us.

At Fiumicino I was met by protocol staff and a car with a driver. The privilege of taking part in a ministerial meeting where I was standing in for the Secretary General of the Council of Europe. The next day and a half were full of incredible impressions and experiences. The conference itself, of course, with its opening in the Colosseum, an evening concert at the Quirinal, the president’s palace, a working session in the Palazzo Barberini, beneath a 400-square-meter Renaissance fresco by Pietro da Cortona, and finally the closing at the Villa Borghese and a tour of the collection and an exhibition in which, among the old masters Caravaggio and Bernini and the marble statues of strapping Romans with small willies, the kitschy sculptures of the British artist Damien Hirst lie in impostor-like, subversive ambush. Art in conversation with art, challenging and commenting on it. Very good. In a few hours of free time, I also managed to visit the exhibition of the notorious and socially engaged Banksy at the Chiostro del Bramante. One of the most harrowing works is a doormat on which the word “welcome” is embroidered. The yellow strip is made of life jackets that, along with many bodies of the unfortunate, washed up on European beaches during deadly refugee crossings of the Mediterranean. Art that comments, challenges and accuses.

After the conference I am driven back to Rome’s main airport. On the right I see a mighty building of white marble. It is the most important structure of the new city district that Mussolini had built for the world exhibition planned for 1942. Because of the war, the exhibition never took place, but the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a monumental building with abstract arches and neoclassical statues, remained. On it is a restored inscription that the Duce himself had engraved there. It describes Italians as a people of poets, artists, heroes, saints, thinkers, navigators and transmigrants. What he meant by that last one is not entirely clear to me, but I am sure he was not thinking of people who, fleeing war and poverty, risk everything to secure a better life for themselves and their families. A paradox? Not to me. This too is part of history, of cultural heritage, which matters because it reflects what we were, sometimes at our best, sometimes at our worst. If we preserved only the legacy of beautiful stories, the world would be much poorer.

Authoritarians love monuments. Ancient Rome, which left humanity such an extraordinary architectural heritage, was not known for its humanism either. In the end, culture and heritage are not determined solely by the ideology that built them, but by our understanding of them and our relationship to them. Today the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana houses the global headquarters of the fashion house Fendi. Instead of the leather boots of the Duce’s squadristi, its marble corridors echo with very expensive high heels.

The journey back from Ronchi to Ljubljana takes me longer than the outward one. The Primorska motorway lives up to its reputation and serves me a monumental traffic jam. I leave it at Logatec and return by the old road. In those forests my grandfather and I used to pick mushrooms. For a snack, he always had in his pocket a piece of parmesan, hard as stone, wrapped in a handkerchief, which he cut with his pocketknife as if it were a truffle. Grandpa was a man of the Karst and a conscious Slovenian. But castor oil and fascists or not, Italian culture always was and remained an important part of his identity.