Poetry “I will pass through Piazza di Spagna” shows the date at the bottom: 28 March 1950. Piazza di Spagna seen from Cesare Pavese it is a diaphanous apparition of air and sun, a spring wonder, a singing miracle. The entire lyric is a synesthesia that pays homage, in a polyphonic synthesis of colours, smells, sounds, to one of the most evocative views of Rome: the steps of Trinità dei Monti at Piazza di Spagna. Guiding the steps of Pavese, who that same year in Rome, in the setting of the Nymphaeum of Villa Giulia, would win the Premio Strega with The beautiful summer, it was however the illusion of a sad love. The solemn appearance of the staircase, located in the center of the square, which opens up before the eyes of the passer-by like a mirage, actually hid the illusion of finding the beloved woman.
The dedicatee of the poem, which appears “firm and clear” at the end, was the blonde American actress Constance Dowlingthe same protagonist of You, Wind of March written by the author in the previous days.
The poems written by Pavese for Constance were collected in the slim anthology of just ten poems Death will come and will have your eyeswhich would be published posthumously and – in retrospect – appears as a tragic premonition of Pavese’s suicide.
Love for Constance would have been the torment of the last months of the writer’s life who in the pages of his diary, The craft of living, he regretted not having her next to him on the evening of the awarding of the Strega. Exactly one month after the victory, Cesare Pavese would have taken his own life in the lonely heat of August in Turin; in the last pages of his diary he wrote “you don’t kill yourself for the love of a woman” but, he added sinisterly, one kills oneself because love “any love, reveals us in our nakedness, misery, defenselessness”.
I will pass through Piazza di Spagna it is an epiphanic vision that transforms the steps of Trinità dei Monti into an allegory of Paradise and the square in the end becomes a personification of the beloved woman who also seems to advance in our direction, as if responding to a call. Everything moves in Pavese’s poetry: passers-by, swallows, the sun and even what is inanimate, such as the fountains, the terraces, the street itself, everything appears in a wavering movement like the sea which replicates the “turmoil” , so similar to the heartbeat.
Long one plaque with the text of Pavese’s poem it was exhibited on one side of the square, next to the prestigious tea room Babington’sanother place of worship, an essential stop for anyone walking in the surrounding area.
On the occasion of April 21st, let’s find out text, analyses And meaning of poetry.
“I will pass through Piazza di Spagna” by Cesare Pavese: text
It will be a clear sky.
The roads will open
on the hill of pines and stone.
The tumult of the streets
that still air will not change.
The sprayed flowers
of colors at the fountains
they will stare like women
have fun. Stairs
the terraces the swallows
they will sing in the sun.
That road will open,
the stones will sing,
the heart will beat and jump
like water in fountains –
this will be the voice
who will climb your stairs.
The windows will know
the smell of stone and air
early morning. A door will open.
The tumult of the streets
it will be the tumult of the heart
in the lost light.
It will be you – firm and clear.
“I will pass through Piazza di Spagna” by Cesare Pavese: analysis and meaning
Pavese fully conveys the vital and joyful atmosphere of most beautiful square in Rome, as welcoming as an open-air living room. The semantic field of light is dominant as is that of movement. Everything is “clear”, the light itself appears lost and wandering, the streets open up praising the movement, while all around is a synesthesia of sounds, smells, colors with spring vivacity. The turmoil which – in the end we discover to be above all internal – stops in the meeting: just as passers-by stop once they reach the top of the staircase to admire the view of Rome, so Pavese stops in ecstatic contemplation in front of the woman he loves.
The tumult of the streets, the perpetual shuffling of passers-by that relentlessly beats the streets of the capital, calms down and, with it, also the beating in the heart. Even the noise appears sweet, like the scent of flowers in spring, so intense that it stuns and dulls the senses.
The final line of the poem, isolated from everything else, “It will be you – firm and clear”, makes sense in itself and reveals to us the true purpose of the research with that sudden “you” that had not been announced before and now reveals itself, surprising as a longed-for meeting that responds to a long wait. Her luminosity was what also distinguished Constance Dowling’s beautiful sculpted face, her blond hair framed it like a halo giving her an angelic air: “firm and clear”, in fact.
All around is silence: despite wanting to write a love poem, Pavese managed to create a verse capable of extinguishing the city noises and of immortalising, in a snapshot with a prodigious effect, the eternal beauty of Piazza di Spagna in its granite splendor.
Tags: Cesare Paveses poem dedicated Rome
