Festina Lente
Visiting Italy is travelling through time as well as space. It is not just that so many things are old and beautiful, having been caressed by centuries of hands; it is that the same people have lived on this land more or less forever which, for a diasporic Jew like me, is both enviable and unimaginable. That is, Italians are both a casa and in patria, while like a turtle I carry my home on my back.
My knapsack flaunts a Canadian flag these days, just as it did during the Vietnam war. Then as now it was advisable to distinguish oneself from Americans when journeying abroad. Poor Yanks, so easily seduced by the spectacle of wealth! The fabulously wealthy Medicis never promised anything to ordinary people, but their patronage of the arts and sciences – Galileo and Michaelangelo nodding at each other across the aisle in Santa Croce – ensured Italian patrimony. And the last Medici heiress, Anna Maria Louisa, donated the Uffizi Gallery to the world.
The Medicis adopted the motto of the emperor Octavian, also known as Augustus Caesar: Festina lente, or “Make haste slowly.” Great-nephew of childless Julius and his heir, he became known as “Augustus” after he’d defeated Mark Antony at the battle of Actium, consolidating his rule and ushering in two hundred years of Pax Romana. Wanting to be loved by the people, he established more equitable taxes, built temples and roads, and melted down eighty silver statues that had been erected in his likeness.
This was in marked contrast to Nero, the last Caesar, who ruled forty years after Octavian’s death. When the great fire of Rome destroyed two-thirds of the city, Nero taxed the citizenry heavily, saying he needed the money to rebuild their homes and make Rome great again. Instead, he built a golden palace with a private lake and erected a 36-metre-tall statue to himself in front of it. If you sense an analogy coming, you are right; it is irresistible. Though the American motto is not Festina lente but “Move fast and break things.”