Temples, kitsch, and imagined lives

Ninety kilo-meters south of Naples lies the ruined city of Paestum. Originally known as Poseidonia after the Greek god of the sea, ancient legend had it that the city was founded by Jason and the Argonauts during their search for the Golden Fleece. That is certainly what I would like to believe. But archaeologists insist that it was founded by Greek colonists around 600 B.C. These Greek colonists were conquered by an Italian people called the Lucans 200 years later. In 273 B.C., as Rome came into ascendance, the city was assimilated into the Roman Empire and was renamed Paestum.

The new Roman colony flourished. Its local pines, which made for excellent ships, gave rise to a shipbuilding industry so successful that the area surrounding the city was deforested. It gradually turned into a marshland and became a source of malaria. The spread of the disease, a rising water level, and seismic disturbances caused a long and irreversible decline. But the city lived long enough to witness the rise of Christianity; one of its temples was made into a church by the converted citizenry. The advent of Moslem raids in the 9th century sounded the death knell for the city. Paestum was deserted by its citizens and remained buried and largely undiscovered until the 1950s. It is now considered the finest preserved Greek temple complex in the Mediterranean world. With such a history and reputation behind it, I could not resist dragging my wife to see it.

I am captivated by antiquity, history and legend. Sadly, my wife is more easily captivated by anything resembling a shopping mall, however small. After a two-hour drive to Paestum from the Amalfi Coast, we parked our car right next to a small group of stalls selling curios and souvenirs. When she realized that prices here were lower than anywhere else we’d been to in Italy, no amount of pique on my part could get her to walk among the ruins with me. Fuming, I walked through the gate, stepped into a lonely windswept field, and came into a scene so lovely that my anger dissipated.

There, gleaming white against an azure sky, stood three Greek temples – the Temple of Neptune, the Temple of Ceres, and the Temple of Hera. Big, bold and dramatic, they were perfectly preserved. If ever there was a testament to the Golden Mean so beloved of the ancient Greeks, this was it. The temples were simple, harmonious, and completely symmetrical. The Doric columns, their simple vertical lines, and the pediments of each temple made you look skywards, the better to contemplate the absolute harmony of the universe and the power of the gods that created it.

What can be more evocative than viewing ancient ruins sitting forlorn and abandoned while one’s imagination fills the void and makes it all alive again? Who were the people that created these architectural marvels? What led them to the principles and beliefs that conjured up these wonders? How did they go about their daily lives? What were their life-spans? Did they really paint all their temples in garish colors? Did they know the meaning of kitsch? Did they really have a cult that practiced public sex on the steps of the Temple of Hera to ensure fertility? Were there onlookers? Were they allowed to enjoy such exotic scenery? Could they join in? Would this qualify as an orgy or merely a fertility rite? Did they make those distinctions? If it all ended up a sexual melee, how did they determine which child was whose? All these thoughts were crowding my mind as I wandered about the ruins. My imagination was running wild. It was time to let go and rejoin my wife.

I managed to find her knee-deep in kitschy reproductions of famous sculptures, tourist postcards, bric-a-brac, ceramics from Northern Italy but probably made in China, super-cheap Italian tableware the price of which betrayed its Chinese provenance, aprons with Michelangelo’s David’s definitely Italian penis strategically placed where the wearer’s genitals would be, and all manner of must-haves for the taste-challenged. After she bought every imaginable apron she could find (except the David one) to give away as presents, I managed to pry my wife loose and get her into the museum adjacent to the "shopping mall."

We were unprepared for what the museum had to offer. In the innermost recesses of this small, provincial museum were a series of excavated tombs which had been pried loose from the earth and rebuilt within its protective confines. These were the tombs of the Greeks and Lucans of ancient Poseidonia. In them were frescoes of chariot races, religious processions, banquets, scenes of people enjoying themselves, people showing affection – scenes indeed of an idealized life that the deceased hoped to enjoy in the afterlife. Whatever the harshness of the lives they had to endure, they were not taking it with them!

Upon returning to the Amalfi Coast, my wife and I decided to have dinner at our hotel and just relax in our room for a change. After a really good meal, we changed and relaxed on our terrace overlooking the Mediterranean while downing a bottle of Limoncello. It was a clear but moonless night. A few stars were out and the lights twinkled all along the coastline as far as the eye could see. The quiet was occasionally broken by a lonely ship coming to shore. I was listening to one of my favorite CDs, The Brazilian Project by Toots Thielemans. Here I was relishing two of my favorite pastimes, traveling and listening to music. I realized how fortunate I was. I was enjoying the best that capitalism and globalization had to offer. I was a Filipino on the Amalfi coast of Italy, flown to these shores by a French airline, listening to Brazilian music played by a Dutch harmonica player that I had archived on a Japanese laptop powered by American technology. I certainly had it over those ancient Greeks and Lucans. No amount of imagination on their part could have conjured up the kind of lives we lead today. Of this there is no doubt – this is a fantastic world we live in!