After four long days in Rome, my feet began to drag. There was a tingling in my left arm, the sun seared my neck, and the relentless trickle of water from the fountains was carving a valley through my brain.

“Ah,” I thought, “I am ill.”

 In my head, I went to see a doctor.

“Si,” said il medico, elegantly adorned. “A standard case of classical fatigue, but nothing that can’t be fixed. Take a dose of Modern Rome and call me in the morning.”

“Grazie,” I said, writing the imaginary doctor an imaginary check, and went to take my cure.

***

Beauty, like all other vices, must be enjoyed in manageable doses. When treasures of art and architecture are lined up like cars in a traffic jam, it’s easy to underappreciate them. “The streets of Rome are filled with rubble / ancient footprints are everywhere,” moaned Bob Dylan in 1971. “You can almost think that you’re seeing double / on a cold dark night on the Spanish Stairs.” And when you see things in double, a work of singular beauty is cheapened. Besides, it can be too easy to find greatness in Rome. I am of the belief that you appreciate rare splendor more when you’ve had to seek it out. In the Eternal City, beauty hits you over the head with a gilded shoe, and you end up, à la Bob Dylan, with some sort of defect in your vision.

Take my visit to the Vatican, for instance: a very depressing experience. Too many imperfect congregants walked all over the numinous Church. I’d seen St. Peter’s Basilica in photographs and on film, and now, witnessing its color scheme disrupted by lemon-yellow t-shirts and hot purple stretch pants, the Church became the church.

When a tour group from Portugal wandered into my shot of St. Peter’s Square, a vision of an empty piazza beneath a mystical sky swam up in my memory and stuck its tongue out. In the Sistine Chapel, as if caught in a flash flood, I was swept by impatient souls past Michelangelo’s depictions of the separation of light and darkness, and the shame of Noah with my arms fluttering helplessly. So overwhelming was the jostling and chattering of my fellow travelers that I couldn’t help but be underwhelmed by the aesthetic.

My walk home every night took me past the Coliseum, where costumed gladiators waited with plastic swords and helmets. For a few coins stuffed into their subligaculum, they would smile and roar for a snapshot. On the Spanish Steps, Bangladeshi tchotchke sellers gave the widest steps in Europe the feeling of an imitation-Prada bazaar. Where was the Rome I had just been reading about, in a novel I’d picked up by Luigi Pirandello, called The Late Mattia Pascal?

“The popes—in their own fashion, mind you—turned the city into a holy water font; and we Italians, in our way, have made it an ashtray.”Ashtray? Seemed more like a warm-weather snow globe.

So I sought respite. I went to the Bioparco di Roma, in the Villa Borghese Estate in the northern part of the city, an expanse of green dotted with that peculiar breed of round-headed Roman pine trees. The bio park boasts brown bears, hippopotami, Siberian tigers and 7,000-pound Asian elephants. Surrounded by hundreds of wild beasts whose memories extended, perhaps, as far back as breakfast, it was easy to let the weight of classical Rome fall off my shoulders.

After tromping through the animal world, I made my way west to visit Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid’s strikingly modern National Museum of 21st Century Arts – better known as the Maxxi.

Located in the otherwise unremarkable Flaminio neighborhood, the Maxxi, with its large courtyard with a gentle, tiled fountain, breathes life into the architectural landscape. Seen from the main entrance off via Guido Reni, you only get a glimpse of the boxy overhang, which protrudes from the building’s concrete and glass façade like the bill of a baseball cap. The Maxxi is a red rubber ball in a city full of glass marbles. Walk there and if the weather is nice, have a seat in the grass and contemplate the blue Roman sky. Feel for a moment that you’re two thousand miles removed from the history of 2,000 years ago.

From the Maxxi it’s a leafy 30-minute walk north along the Tiber River to the Olympic Complex. Stadio dei Marmi [Stadium of Marbles], built in the 1920s, features 59 marble statues of athletes in the classical style, looking inward upon a track field, ready to survey the games. The sparsely clad figures in the open-air breeze provided another needed relief from over-decorated apses and ruins collapsing from tourists. As the only camera-toter at the Stadio dei Marmi, I was able to spend minutes contemplating the glare on the face of the boxer, as well as count the arrows in the archer’s quiver.

Another neighborhood worth visiting is the EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma), in the south. Built by Mussolini for the never-realized 1942 World’s Fair, this is a collection of museums and government office buildings organized along wide boulevards intended more for driving than strolling. Few of the buildings here are treasures, but the sum total of them all creates a weird atmosphere. The design was so ideologically charged, yet somehow it all feels like a desert outpost. This, apparently, is what happens when fascist ideology meets Roman architecture, with steel and glass added to the mix. If only to experience this smothered, desolate pulse so far from the frantic historic center, the EUR should be seen.

About halfway between there and the heart of the city lies the Protestant Cemetery, a lovely resting place for the likes of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a man with a true sense of humor, one Nicola Chiari, erstwhile general in the Italian army. On the latter’s tombstone are carved the words, “Rosebud. What does it mean?” Now there, I thought, is a true Orson Welles fan. Hidden away on the perimeter, there is also the grave of a certain Joseph Hough, architect, on whose stone it is written, “He loved life so, and especially the last six years in Rome.”

Headstones always offer fuel for the imagination, much like ice cream. With that in mind, I crossed over to the west bank of the Tiber, intending to stop at a newly-built church I’d read about and then end the day with a cold treat.

La chiesa del Santo Volto di Gesù, designed by the architectural team of Nathalie Grenon and Piero Sartogo, was completed in 2006. It is situated in the working-class neighborhood of Portuense, a place you’d never have a reason to visit, unless you were hunting for this church — which is definitely reason enough.

A walkway leading to a playground cleaves this starkly modern church in two: on one side is the chapel, a modernist design consisting of marble pews with clean lines and a steel-and-glass spider web backdropping the altar. Above it, instead of a gory Jesus on the Cross, a gentle outline of His form is cut into the cross itself, allowing sunlight to not only pour into the chapel, but actually through the body of Christ. The sun at dawn and the softened symbolism were enough to offset the coldness of the white pews. Across the walkway, there is a children’s nursery school, and when I was there, at seven o’clock in the evening, a gaggle of neighborhood children were playing tag in the lobby of the school and the adjacent playground. The church seamlessly blends inside and outside space and, likely because of it’s out-of-the-way location, functions as a vital organ of the neighborhood and not merely as an accessory.

By now I was tired. I returned in the heat and diminishing light to the narrow, cobblestoned streets of the city’s old Jewish ghetto, where a small gelateria offered me a taste of pistachio heaven. Eating gelato in the summer is a race against nature of a very specific kind: if your spaghetti carbonara goes cold on the plate, it still remains in the same state of matter. But with gelato, if you don’t hurry up and eat the thing, the gods of summer win, and what once was a semisolid is turned cruelly into muck.

Inspired by the marble athletes I’d seen earlier that day, I ate my gelato with fierce determination and digested what I’d seen of Rome. In a city where the antidote is sweet, classical fatigue is nothing to be feared.

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