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  I stop to pull out my sketchbook as the group ascends the olive-lined path, and pretend to be adjusting it to lose them. I don’t want to seem rude, but I can only feel the transition without the chatter. I look up past the overgrown olive trees to the blue sky above. Filtered orange light falls to the ground like shooting stars. The trees shoot off in all directions as far as I can see, I reckon the only way to signal the coming of an Imperial Villa, a village of otium. Were these always here? When Piranesi found the site, did he uncover century-old olive trees and sell their lumber like he did with the site’s statuary? Or was it a modern and cheap way to cover the grounds, hiding the villa away beyond the fronds? A reverence to classical royalty: herald the joyous solemnity of the ruin with the trees of Rome’s founding? Olive, fig, and vine, as Rick said. 

The famed exercise wall comes into the corner of my eye. A warm familiarity rises in my chest, the crowd is thinner at the back so I take a moment to gaze. A sweet scent swings through the air, like a black tea with honey, as I watch Rick lead the group into the grove a few paces. I walk up to the wall and feel the cross-hatched layers of brick ascending five times my height into the sky. When did I first see the photographs? Robert Jan Van Pelt’s class, first year, Wednesdays and Thursdays. One side bathed in light, the other in shadow, of course; and high so as to obscure the complex beyond. Excitement carried my feet to the group as Rick began to speak.  

The sweet smell intensifies, it is the same as in the Forum; I revel in it as I begin a drawing of the wall. As his passion grows into another of his jazz-man’s lectures, Rick calls on the spirits of Romans, and they are shaking that sweet smell from the walls in response. The mortar between tuffa brick bakes in the sun, and I follow a butterfly with my gaze around the scattered circle of students. I feel the ground beneath me, and know I am at home here, “So pay attention!” My head is growing feverish in anticipation. 

My head is hot, I drink water for stamina, but I realise this is going to be a marathon. Le Corbusier filled a sketchbook here; what, in days? How close could I get in three hours? A couple of quotes ride the summer breeze, Yourcenar, Rick, others, Ondaatje will wait; then the starting bell sounded somewhere in the distance. 

I dart to the first thing I see, to stop to wait for the crowd to disappear. The heat beats down as I squint at the cryptic plan of the Villa, lines and arrangements more complex than the Forum, and discern it’s the large baths. I begin the drawing of the remnants of the dome, one side looks as if it were blasted out. As I gaze and measure out proportion, sparrows appear and disappear from the shadows in the pocked brick. These ruins, I realise, have a different meaning than those in the centre of Rome. I pause, these are left to nature’s will. Whatever happened in the centre of the empire, these were lost for millennia, occupied only by these sparrows, vines, and soil. What does it mean that I am gazing at it after all this time being lost to the forest? The alternating arches of the baths, entrances and niches become one in the steam: someone coming in after you, mixed with a nude Adonis in the next bay, and you surrender to their sameness as you submerge your head into the water…A cicada screeches somewhere nearby, I wipe sweat from my forehead and close my pen and draw my sketchbook off of the wood fence. 

Poppies dot themselves between the olive and cypress trees which line the walk uphill to a shaded, narrow stairway. On the plateau you can see an expanse of ruins like a destroyed churchyard left to be overgrown. A gust of hot wind blows from them, dust catches my eyes and flips the pages of my sketchbook as I re-ink my pen for a new drawing. A couple classmates dot the grounds below busying themselves drawing or video-taping. 

I’ve already lost myself in the plan, so I tuck it in the sleeve at the back of my sketchbook and quickly dash through the ‘cathedral’ in the side of the hill, imagining its high walls lit in the evening, flickering in flame like a dungeon. 

I have to back track a few times to find the stair down from the plateau, and eventually call down for directions. When finally there, I take a few steps trying to find my way down to the grass below. Tugging at my shirt to cool off, I stop for a moment in awe at the immense cross-vault overhead, still intact. Phil walks up in mid-sketch of an impressive worm’s eye view, he too is aiming to beat Corb in the 3 hours. He is one whom I can only hope to keep up with, but the rivalry keeps me motivated so I speed-walk to the next location. 

Walking along, all of a sudden the walk opened up into a large field. Looking to my left I was not surprised to see the colonnade surrounding a large geometric lake; just beyond the faceted dome sat above everything. Rick was meeting us there soon enough so I took a few photos and walked the promenade to the dome to set up once again. I flipped back through the drawings in the sketchbook, each began to carry with it some dimension of a memory; the moments spent on it, putting down the details you perceive, Bréton booms in my ears ‘that which the mind registers is the solution to a problem …”. A sketch is a representation of attention. With this I open my fude and begin to draw. 

* * *

I darted around for the next hour as in a dream. There wasn’t enough time to draw but I did what I could. The baths with their undulating, Baroque-like curves were too complex to understand in the little time I had, the sketch was so poor I ran on. I went out to the round tomb separated from everything by a pilgrim’s walk. Its posited this was the tomb of Hadrian’s famed young love Antinuous, made a god, a city named after him. You could climb on top of the cylinder which held its own in a small clearing in the wild, wispy trees and vines surround. Standing atop the lookout, the sweet honey smell returned as I contemplated the rural Roman landscape as Hadrian once did. The sadness of Antonuous’ suicide (at least according to Yourcenar) filled my mind as my gaze crossed to the left. There, peaking out of the summer haze I could make out the dome of St. Peter’s. Somehow it seemed larger when viewed from far away, it pricked up off of the horizon’s haze. It was somehow perfectly placed in the valley of the Tiber to dominate the whole area; and yet filled a quarter almost purpose-left for the new Catholic Roman world. Something held me there, maybe catching my breath in the hot sun. Something felt vulnerable at the edge of the Villa. Like the dream of the place was precariously reaching out towards the real, the dreamscape coming out of reverie. The death of Antinuous a scene which likely broke even his reverie. 

I ran back, tracking back through everything like a rewinding film; past the small baths, lake and faceted dome, cathedral and cross vault, baths, to the right of the entry wall, then the path rises into an obscure corner where some column capitals and roof decoration were still in tact. Opening onto a small clearing full of grasses, there, in the side-wall there was an opening through which you saw only sky. As I approached, now dripping with sweat and trying desperately to keep steady, I looked down the stair and saw water. 

Stepping into the ring of the Maritime Theatre, I see the class gathering, all of us slightly confused, piecing together what this smattering of columns and arches once were. As Rick begins, he describes the layers of columns as a layered nest, surrounded by birdcages and centred with a dome inscribed with the constellations. The lattice of a building, now half standing and half among the dotted poppies, feels like the interior of a mindscape. The rest of the villa as its radiating creation. The fever slows as Rick begins to tell a story of how this place inspired Ondaatje’s final chapter of In the Skin of a Lion. The fever itself but a creation of the thought that I want to refer back to this place, that I want to capture it better than Corb or my classmates, really drink in the poesis of it, to step as Hadrian did and take from this what it was he was after. After running the gamut, exhausting myself, I sat at the side listening to Rick satisfied. The race to relate to the Villa was not a race, it had never been. The drawings I had done, and the race I’d run was the slow gathering of evidence that it was such a ridiculous pursuit of air. 

What to learn from the dream-child of the most prolific builder in the Roman Empire? These dreams can be yours too, the work is not the frantic study and competition, it is the fresh fragrance on the wind which makes you want to stay, to create a palace for the wind, or the rain, or the olive tree. To build architecture as the cypress grows, slowly, along the pathways which were set, completely new, yet completely tied to the past. 

Reprise

Architecture remains an important part of my life despite its drawing farther away from me in the past years. I realised in the Villa that the joy of architecture can be found in its practice. So long as the architecture is of the utmost quality and longevity, will it be remembered no matter the age or the values which have come to succeed your own.The simple poetics are all that is left. It is the bones, the sketch, the spirit; whether empires fall or interests wane, it is the effort of the hand to render understanding which makes and remakes the psyche. It is the dream which creates the dream ad infinitum. 

I didn’t realise it would be years until I could revisit the site. I missed my chance when I returned to Rome for a week because of a scheduling error. So I have sat down and tried to remember the day and relate it as best I can for the future me to reference again. I still dream of this place, it sits dormant, a revelation of the inner mind of its creator, a map of the symbols constellated in his mind. In the event that the dream subsides and I find a new path, I will still have this moment afterward to remember the inspiration found in the Villa Hadriani.