During my first weeks in Rome, the city was more than the backdrop to a period of bureaucratic waiting. It was also a means of psychological survival. I would leave the overheated room at the guesthouse or Sirio’s home and walk through Rome so as not to be overwhelmed by uncertainty. Monuments, churches, squares, gardens, and even posters pasted on walls gradually formed an inner map of that period.

I have preserved these walks here not as a mere tourist interlude, but as part of the purgatory of emigration. At a time when my future was suspended, Rome was unknowingly teaching me about endurance, the layering of histories, and survival.

The lady with the little dog

A few days after my arrival in Rome, on a sweltering afternoon in early September, I left the Caritas canteen and, rather than return to my overheated little room, made my customary visit to the cool interior of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Afterwards, I decided to spend the siesta walking down the Esquiline Hill towards the city centre. It must have been about two o’clock when I turned into Via Milano, a broad street leading to the tunnel beneath the presidential palace on the Quirinal Hill and then directly into the centre. At that hour, with the fierce heat pouring from the sky, I was alone in the street as far as the eye could see. Suddenly, in the distance, a woman appeared from behind the thick plane trees lining the road.

The woman wore a flowing white dress and carried a large checked bag. On a leash she held a little white dog that, from a distance, looked like a Bichon Frisé. The dog darted to and fro, inspecting every corner of the pavement and every tree root. What caught my attention was that, despite the stifling heat, it wore a checked waistcoat matching its owner’s bag. Amused, I continued to watch the pair as they approached. At one point the dog found a suitable spot and assumed the familiar position in which dogs relieve themselves. The woman waited patiently until it had finished. Then, under the dog’s watchful gaze, as though it were making sure she did everything properly, she took two small bags from her handbag. From one she removed a glove and put it on her right hand; with it she picked up what the dog had left on the pavement and placed it in the second bag. Finally, she removed the glove, put it back in the first bag, closed both bags, and returned them to her handbag. The dog then resumed its enthusiastic sniffing of the pavement, held firmly on the leash by its imperturbable owner.

When we finally passed each other, I could not resist greeting her. “Buongiorno,” I said. “Buongiorno,” she replied with a smile, slightly surprised. Her dyed black hair was gathered in a bun, and she still looked young, although she was probably over sixty.

The incident made me reflect. Why had the gesture of the lady in white surprised me? Had I found it out of place? Too extravagant? Nothing of the kind. I realised that I was simply unaccustomed to such civic habits. In my own country, too, people kept dogs in their yards or homes and took them out to relieve themselves, but I had never seen anyone collect the excrement and carry it until a suitable place for disposal could be found, out of consideration for others. Such scrupulous concern for harmonious coexistence—for civility in the broadest sense—marked a clear difference between what I had known until then and what I was about to experience, provided, of course, that my new fellow citizens were as well mannered as the lady in white, which later proved not always to be the case.

Roman landscapes and traces of the past

Following Anca’s advice, I took advantage of my presence in Rome to explore both the centre and the outskirts, not knowing when I might have another opportunity. Rome, a city of eternal beauty and ancient ruins, became for me a place in which to reflect on the past and its continuity in the present. During my walks I observed people and their customs, discovered delightful corners absent from tourist guides, and, naturally, took pleasure in visiting Rome’s celebrated monuments. In Italy for the first time, and fascinated by history since childhood, I began to feel like a spectator in a historical drama in which layers of the past overlapped and every wall seemed to contain a story. Many of the monuments and remnants of the past that I visited, studied, and revisited remained engraved in my memory, creating a subjective image of the city that time could no longer erase.

The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore

The first monument I visited was the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, only a short walk from the Di Rienzo guesthouse where I was staying. During the scorching days of early September, I would often stop at the fountain in front of the basilica to drink and fill a bottle with its continuously flowing cold water, because the water from the sink in my room was undrinkable. Each time, I would enter the basilica for a few minutes, enjoying both the cool interior and the marvels with which popes and cardinals had enriched it over sixteen centuries.

Standing at the top of the Esquiline Hill, Santa Maria Maggiore (Fig. 4) is one of Rome’s four papal basilicas. Following the urban reorganisation undertaken by Pope Sixtus V in the sixteenth century, the basilica came to stand at one end of an avenue designed by the pope’s architects, which crosses central Rome and reaches Piazza del Popolo. The two ends of this urban axis created under Sixtus V are marked by obelisks that seem to gaze at one another across the centre of Rome. One stands on the basilica’s axis, in front of the apse, and came from the Mausoleum of Augustus; the other stands in the middle of Piazza del Popolo and belongs to the collection of obelisks brought by Roman emperors from pharaonic Egypt.

The basilica has a campanile visible from many parts of the city. It houses five bells cast in different periods, each with its own name and story. In the mornings, I would wake in my little room enveloped by their pealing as the sound entered through the open window.

On the hilltop, the basilica’s façade opens onto a square in whose centre rises another imposing monument, the Column of Peace, likewise recovered by the popes from Roman ruins. A bronze statue of the Virgin and Child was placed on top, while the marble and travertine base allows tired tourists to rest—and even to sleep during the day, as beggars do there at night. At the foot of the column is a splendid fountain supplied by one of the aqueducts that bring cool, fresh water to Rome.

According to tradition, the Virgin Mary inspired the construction of this church by appearing in a dream to Pope Liberius more than 1,600 years ago and asking him to build a church on a site that she would reveal miraculously. When an extraordinary snowfall whitened the Esquiline Hill one August morning, Liberius regarded it as the promised miracle and traced the outline of the new church in the snow. It was subsequently built with funds provided by wealthy patricians. Santa Maria Maggiore is the only basilica in Rome that, despite later additions, has preserved its original early Christian structure from the fifth and sixth centuries. The transept and present apse, decorated with rich mosaics depicting the coronation of the Virgin Mary seated on a sumptuous throne and dressed in royal garments typical of Byzantine fashion, were added some nine centuries later and form a synthesis of Byzantine art and the Roman artistic spirit.

The basilica houses one of the most important Marian icons in the Byzantine tradition, known as Salus Populi Romani, which depicts the Mother of God standing with the Child Jesus in her arms (Fig. 5). Tradition attributes the image to Saint Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of painters. The icon is especially dear to popular devotion and closely associated with the identity of Rome and its popes, many of whom dedicated votive offerings to it. It was carried in processions organised by the Church to pray for an end to epidemics afflicting Rome. From the foundation of their order, the Jesuits promoted Marian devotion and reverence for the Mother of God by distributing copies of the icon throughout the world.

Over the centuries, the basilica was enlarged with chapels in which seven popes and several cardinals are buried. The most sumptuous is the Sistine Chapel of Pope Sixtus V, the principal figure in Rome’s late-sixteenth-century urban transformation. Another celebrated chapel is the Sforza Chapel, whose architecture was designed by Michelangelo in his old age.

The richly carved coffered ceiling was gilded with gold leaf which, according to tradition, came from the first shipment of gold sent to Spain by Christopher Columbus from America and then donated by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile to Pope Rodrigo Borgia (Fig. 6).

The early Christian mosaic in the apse was lost and replaced by one created by Jacopo Torriti during a reorganisation of the entire choir area under Pope Nicholas IV (1288–1292), who ordered the replacement without completely changing the original subject.

The commission for the new apse mosaic was entrusted to Jacopo Torriti around 1291. Its principal subject is the Coronation of the Virgin (Fig. 8), accompanied by scenes from the life of Mary. The Dormition of the Mother of God occupies the central panel (Fig. 9).

The Orange Garden

Another place I discovered during my first days in Rome, and later visited frequently either with friends or alone, was the Orange Garden on the Aventine Hill. It is a popular destination, a distinctive place that every visitor to Rome should see.

It was one of the days when I still hoped to walk to Via Dandolo every evening for dinner at Caritas. I had to cross virtually the whole centre of Rome, follow the Aurelian Walls, and then cross the Tiber at Porta Portese; from there, after crossing Viale di Trastevere, the destination was another ten minutes away. Trying different routes one afternoon as the sun was setting, I decided to follow the path beside the Circus Maximus, map in hand. I saw that its vast arena floor formed a depression between two hills, the Palatine and the Aventine. The Palatine was covered with the ruins of imperial buildings and could not be visited freely; the Aventine, by contrast, with its gentler slopes, was only a short distance away and seemed to be waiting for me.

As I climbed the Aventine from the Circus Maximus, I came upon the Fontana del Mascherone, composed of an ancient granite basin and a carved marble mask from whose mouth water flowed. Beside it was the entrance to the garden. I passed through the iron gate and was struck by the red light of the setting sun streaming triumphantly through the branches of tall pine trees.

A broad paved avenue opened before me, bordered on both sides by low orange trees. The garden is renowned for these bitter oranges, brought from Spain eight hundred years ago, which give it a distinctive character, especially during the transition from winter to spring, when yellow fruit gleams here and there through the dense green foliage. I began walking along the central avenue, and from about halfway down it the high points of Rome gradually appeared beyond the terrace parapet: the majestic dome of St Peter’s Basilica, Trinità dei Monti, the Pincian terrace—another panoramic viewpoint—and the Quirinal Palace. As I moved slowly forward, the panorama widened until I reached the garden’s terrace. From there, especially that evening with the sunset reddening the sky, there was a spectacular view over Rome’s rooftops, Tiber Island, St Peter’s Basilica, and the Altar of the Fatherland in Piazza Venezia. The many churches and monuments of the historic centre were also visible.

Located next to the Orange Garden, the church of Santa Sabina is one of the best preserved early Christian churches in the historic center of Rome. One of the peculiarities of this church, completed more than a millennium and a half ago, is that it has no façade, although great Renaissance architects such as Fontana and Borromini worked on its restoration.

Also on the Aventine is the church of Saints Boniface and Alexius, founded at an early date, between the fourth and fifth centuries, and rebuilt several times. The present church preserves elements from all those periods: the bell tower is Romanesque, some columns from the original church survive in the apse, the portico is medieval, and the façade dates from the sixteenth century. Today it is a sought-after venue for church weddings.

Walking through the neighbourhood on the Aventine Hill, I noticed the quiet of its streets, lined with elegant buildings belonging to wealthy residents; property prices there were the highest in Rome.

The Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano

On one of those days of aimless walking through the stifling atmosphere of late Roman summer—walks that drew me out of my room at the guesthouse and kept my mind occupied with the new sights along the way—I drank my ration of cold water at the fountain in front of Santa Maria Maggiore and set off downhill along Via Merulana, shaded by large trees. Usually busy, the street was almost deserted on that hot day. Walking slowly, I found myself in an enormous square dominated by another Roman basilica: San Giovanni in Laterano. I had the feeling that “this ought to be one of the centres of the city.” The feeling proved correct. San Giovanni in Laterano was not Rome’s most famous church, yet in the strict sense it was its cathedral. The episcopal seat of Rome was here; this, in fact, was Pope John Paul II’s cathedral—not St Peter’s, however completely that basilica may dominate our imagination.

From where I stood, I could see an obelisk rising in the middle of the square. Roman emperors had brought it from ancient Egypt, where it had been erected by Thutmose III in the fifteenth century BC. It reinforced an idea encountered everywhere in central Rome: time layered not merely in centuries, but in millennia. Beyond the obelisk was the secondary entrance to the basilica, created under Sixtus V.

To reach the main entrance, I walked around the building and entered another square used for May Day demonstrations and trade-union gatherings. The basilica’s façade was enormous, designed more than a thousand years after the original building had been erected. On it, with almost childlike wonder, I read the solemn formula that says everything:

The great doors, open to all visitors, had once belonged to the Roman Senate. I suddenly realised that the Lateran was no longer merely another stop on the tourist map, but a root shared by all of us: a fourth-century building raised on the site of the Laterani palace and associated with the donation of Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena, immediately after Christianity was legalised. It was thus built upon the ruins of the Roman Empire and announced a new era. San Giovanni in Laterano, in other words, is not an isolated “masterpiece”, but a historical threshold.

Inside, the vast basilican space opens out through side aisles and a rhythm of columns, while the Baroque interior, like the façade, forms a great bridge across the centuries. I particularly remembered the statues of the Apostles in the nave’s niches, like a petrified procession staged by Borromini. The eye is then drawn to the papal altar beneath a baldachin, or ciborium. According to tradition, it contains the wooden altar on which Saint Peter himself celebrated the liturgy. The present structure dates from 1368 and is the work of Giovanni di Stefano. High above, the ciborium houses reliquaries said to contain the heads of Saints Peter and Paul. The twelve paintings surrounding it are by Antoniazzo Romano and his school. In the apse, the medieval mosaic retains the radiance of a monumental icon: Christ at the centre, sacred figures around Him, a visual language from an age when images took the place of books.

I learned an interesting story when I asked a priest in my neighbourhood what connection Henry IV of France had with this cathedral, since an equestrian statue of him had been erected in the transept portico at the secondary entrance. I was told that Henry of Navarre, a former Calvinist who converted to Catholicism in order to become king, had donated an abbey in southern France to the basilica. In return, the Roman Church commissioned the statue from a French sculptor who had settled in Rome. The basilica’s chapter also granted Henry IV the title of honorary proto-canon. Every year on 13 December, his birthday, a Missa pro natione gallica is celebrated in the cathedral. Nearly every French president since René Coty has subsequently claimed the honorary title of proto-canon of San Giovanni in Laterano.

Perhaps because I was then living through my own personal “purgatory”, the Lateran seemed to offer a lesson in continuity. I lived provisionally, from one day to the next, with documents and promises pending; before me stood a place that had survived fires, earthquakes, reconstructions, and changes of style and era, yet had remained what it was from the beginning: the cathedral of Rome.

Returning to the square, I encountered other important monuments of Roman Christianity: the Lateran Palace, the ancient baptistery, and the building of the Holy Stairs, which houses the marble staircase from Jerusalem that Christ is said to have climbed two thousand years ago. They are reminders that here Christianity is not merely “decoration”, but part of the very fabric of history.

I left the cathedral feeling that Rome was unknowingly offering me quiet support: when your life is suspended, the city shows you what it means to endure through time. At that moment I needed precisely this simple thought—that being in limbo is not the same as reaching the end.

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in Rome

On extremely hot days, I sometimes wandered through streets branching off my fixed route between the guesthouse and the canteen, looking at buildings or strolling through parks. Rome has never been renowned for exemplary cleanliness; its streets were often littered with all kinds of rubbish, while house walls were covered with advertisements or scrawled with drawings and texts ranging from obscenities to naive declarations of love. All this contrasted sharply with the history and grandeur of imperial Rome, at least as we imagine it today.

One afternoon, during another walk, a poster bearing a familiar face caught my attention on the wall of a building. I went closer and, beneath the heading “Gloria al Capitano!”, recognised a photograph of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu accompanied by a sentence I had read in childhood, now written in Italian:

“Lascia ad altri le vie dell’infamia. Piuttosto che vincere per mezzo di una infamia, meglio cadere lottando sulla strada dell’onore.” (Translation: “Leave the paths of infamy to others. Rather than prevail through infamy, it is better to fall fighting on the path of honour.”)

Later, in my wanderings through Rome, I repeatedly found the Captain’s face drawn in the same manner, with a few black strokes, on the walls of different buildings. I imagined that the portraits were applied hurriedly at night with a stencil which, once fixed to the wall, was covered with black paint. When the stencil was removed, the easily recognisable outline of Corneliu Codreanu’s portrait remained.

But how could this phenomenon be explained in a country such as Italy, so absorbed in venerating its own historical figures and, in theory, indifferent to foreign ones?

During my years in Italy, I observed that, despite official prohibitions, many people remained nostalgic for Mussolini’s Fascism. Although the Italian Constitution prohibits any reorganisation of the dissolved Fascist Party, Fascism was far from dead in Italy. Its ideology persisted despite the democratic transformation of post-war Italy and periodically affected Italian society through terrorist attacks and neo-Fascist demonstrations. After Mussolini’s fall, Fascist nostalgists grouped themselves into both legal and illegal political organisations. Those who joined them did so with the fervour of belonging to an ideology founded on the “mystique of action”. Over the decades, various far-right groups kept alive the ideal of a “rebirth” of the past, and for some militants Codreanu became an iconic figure. The Lombardy movement Lealtà Azione, for example, draws direct inspiration from Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. For many such nostalgists, especially older ones, he was a guiding star and their dream was to become Legionaries. In their homes, beside a bust of Mussolini, they hung a black-and-white poster showing Codreanu’s powerful, hieratic face and intense gaze. Italians are not alone in their nostalgia for interwar ultranationalism. Romania, too, has not fully confronted its past; consequently, increasing numbers of people there look back nostalgically on the Legionary Movement.

In the schools I attended under Communism, the Legionaries and their Captain were, at best, absent from history textbooks; otherwise, they were presented as antisemitic criminals. Yet many elderly people who had lived between the two world wars described Codreanu as a charismatic figure who inspired confidence and obedience to the ideas he proclaimed. He appeared to despise a “comfortable” life. Life as Codreanu conceived and preached it was serious, austere, religious, and sustained by the moral and responsible powers of the spirit.

Although Codreanu and his followers never developed a fully articulated doctrine, the ideology they preached imagined an ideal world that appealed to people from widely different cultural backgrounds. Codreanu urged his compatriots to lead heroic lives rooted in an awareness of their Dacian and Latin identity. Among those who loved him, a form of social idolatry arose: absolute devotion to the leader, the exaltation of his thought and abilities, and the attribution of infallibility to him. The Hungarian Jewish historian Nagy-Talavera, who was deported to Auschwitz during the war and had no reason to sympathise with Legionary ideology, attended a Legionary commemoration and described Zelea Codreanu’s appearance as follows:

“Suddenly the crowd fell silent. A tall man of melancholy beauty, dressed in the white costume of the Romanian peasantry, rode into the cemetery. His childlike, sincere smile shone above the wretched crowd, while he himself seemed mysteriously elsewhere, far removed from it. Charisma is an inadequate word for the strange power that emanated from that man. And there he remained, silent, in the midst of the crowd. He had no need to speak. His silence was eloquent; he seemed stronger than all of us.”

From what I later read and heard, Zelea Codreanu was something of a favoured son of the country’s elites, who indulged and admired him despite the crimes committed. Two cultured women dear to me come to mind as examples of this admiration: my aunt Nidia, daughter of General Niculescu-Cociu, and Professor Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga, both of whom spoke enthusiastically to me about the Captain. Aunt Nidia maintained that, had her parents not firmly opposed her and threatened to confine her to the house—her father then commanded King Carol II’s palace guard—she would, for Codreanu’s sake, have attended every meeting of the Legionary “nests”. Mrs Bușulenga told me that she had been in love with the Captain and that many other girls had adored him as she did. Prominent interwar intellectuals such as Nae Ionescu, Mircea Eliade, Petre Țuțea, and Mircea Vulcănescu were, in one way or another, drawn to the Legionary Movement. In December 1940, the brilliant philosopher Emil Cioran, himself sympathetic to the Legionaries, wrote the following extravagant eulogy of Codreanu’s legacy:

“In the Captain’s presence, no one remained lukewarm. A new tremor passed through the country. A human realm haunted by the essential. Suffering becomes the measure of worth, and death the measure of calling. In a few years Romania experienced a tragic pulse whose intensity consoles us for the cowardice of a thousand years outside history. One man’s faith gave birth to a world that leaves ancient tragedy and Shakespeare behind. And all this in the Balkans!”

Although many of these intellectuals later disavowed Legionary ideology, describing their commitment as a youthful aberration, the question remains how sincere that renunciation was and whether it was instead an accommodation to new political realities.

Yet, as “the sleep of reason produces monsters”, devotion to the Captain within the world preached by the Legionaries led to atrocious crimes; the “mystique of action” that they so greatly exalted degenerated into episodes of extreme violence. The glorification of sacrifice and suffering that helped turn Codreanu into a myth had tragic consequences. Beyond the aura of mythical romanticism, the historical reality is more complex. The Legionary Movement was not merely a spiritual group, but also a militant organisation responsible for political assassinations, including those of Constantin Manciu, Ion G. Duca, Nicolae Iorga, Virgil Madgearu, and Armand Călinescu. The “mystique of action” is difficult to separate from Codreanu’s figure, even when he was not directly involved.

Codreanu was neither the first nor the last political leader to be turned into a martyr by a violent death. His killing in 1938 inevitably strengthened his myth and made him a symbol of nationalist sacrifice. The myth of the Captain reflects people’s desire for heroic figures or mystical leaders during periods of radical change. Although he was not Romanian by origin, Codreanu became perhaps the leader in modern Romanian history most heavily invested with mysticism and subsequently mythologised: a kind of archangel who fought to defend the essence of the Romanian people, unfortunately through assassinations and activities that were often criminal, not condemned by public opinion and tolerated by a hesitant state. Today we would call it an exemplary cult of personality.

After Codreanu’s death, the way later generations viewed him changed over time. In contemporary Romania, his image continues to be reinterpreted. His historical role is again being debated, and the partial rehabilitation of his image forms part of a broader reassessment of interwar figures. In the present context of a state accused of undemocratic conduct, the darker aspects of the Captain have been played down and his messianic dimension emphasised. Amid widespread dissatisfaction with the political class, Codreanu is being rediscovered as a symbol of morality and sacrifice, sharply contrasting with present-day perceptions of corruption and lack of ideals. This shows how collective memory can turn historical leaders into icons, sometimes detached from the reality of their actions and reinterpreted in the light of present needs. I believe, however, that his return to public discourse rests less on a genuine embrace of Legionary ideology than on the continuing attraction of his myth.

In conclusion, Codreanu remains one of the most contradictory figures in Romania’s history, a history rich in controversial personalities. For some, he is a symbol of honour and sacrifice; for others, the promoter of an ideology that led to violence and division. This ambivalence explains why, almost a century after his death, his face continues to appear not only on walls in Rome, but also in campaign rhetoric and debates about Romania’s national identity.

I could not help thinking that this shared Italian and Romanian fascination with Codreanu forms an underground bond between the two Latin countries, rooted in parallels that emerged during the same troubled interwar period and in a common attraction to messianic figures and ideologies promising to “save” national identities. During that exceptional era, similar political situations in several European countries produced related ideologies which post-war historiography, aligned with the victors, classified as reactionary and placed beyond the pale, without succeeding in erasing them from the memory of later generations. In a sense, the parallel trajectories of the two “Captains”—Mussolini and Codreanu—transformed by posterity into martyrs and still haunting the heart of European civilisation, have become a symbol of the forces eroding a Europe that lacks an uncontested unifying identity.

Conclusion

These walks solved nothing in practical terms. They did not find me a job, bring forward my interview at the American Consulate, or remove the precariousness of my situation. But they made the waiting bearable. Between Caritas, the guesthouse, telephone calls, and paperwork, Rome offered me another register of reality: that of things that outlast people, regimes, and temporary circumstances.

That is why, in my memory, the Rome of those months is not merely the city in which I waited. Through its beauty and contradictions, it compelled me to look beyond immediate urgency and understand that a new life begins not only with a document or a visa, but also with the way one learns to make a foreign place part of one’s inner world.

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