Walking Rome without leaving home: practicing cultural geography during the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction

The closure of public spaces due to the COVID-19 pandemic is already the subject of many studies. ¹ As these works show, in response to COVID-19, spatial practices are changing, and our research methods must change, or at least be revisited, as well. How can or should we be cultural geographers during the lockdown? How can we adjust fieldwork methodologies to accommodate social-distancing measures? When our ability to be present in physical space is limited, the role of our memories grows. Perhaps, in these times, we should be even more open to self-exploration, linking our lectures and imagination with distanced spaces. Perhaps we need to include creative reading as a practice of cultural (auto)geography. ²

Geographers often examine or discuss various places, scales, and territories without necessarily visiting such spaces, using their imagination and drawing on existing research. ³ Similarly, the ‘own room traveller’ ⁴ contemplates and interprets their ‘usual surroundings without actually leaving them’, ⁵ writing down the experience of travelling in a home, familiar environment. However, Bernd Stiegler’s concept of traveling in place is about something else: distancing from the space of everyday life and transforming the current way of using the everyday environment. This kind of travel is not just a journey into the imagination, but a re-visiting of home objects by using personal knowledge.

What I propose here is, by contrast, a journey to distant destinations and to one’s own interior or, more precisely, to concepts and theories fixed in the researcher’s mind. I suggest that experimental reading is a practice that can help the researcher discover their prior geographical knowledge. By ‘experimental’, I mean reading that allows researchers to discover, interfere with, and test methodologies and relationships with a given text. I do not mean reading as an extension of knowledge (about culture, space, time) but, instead, reading as a way to provoke knowledge and a geographical imagination. It is not so much a ‘geography of reading’ as ‘reading as geography’.

If we consider experimental reading to be essential for practicing cultural geography during a pandemic, urban travel guides can be useful for this purpose. Do such guides, I ask, reinforce my prior knowledge of a given place, or can they lead me to completely different fields of research and to new concepts? The argument I develop here is that reading urban travel narratives from the past enriches the practice of cultural geography. The practice of reading such texts involves the researcher’s knowledge and tests their ability to use this knowledge in a creative way. I suggest using these travel texts for exercises such as discovering the narrator, understanding locational formulations, and assessing the role of our own assumptions and memories in studying urban narratives.

Reading and experimenting

Rome, as an iconic tourist destination in Italy, has changed its face as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic. ⁶ I was in Rome in 2014 for a short family stay and visited the most popular sites – Colosseum, St. Peter’s Basilica, Forum Romanum – which are likely familiar even to those who have never been to Rome. I barely recall, however, any street names from this stay, having focused my memories instead on the nice time spent with loved ones. During the pandemic, I decided to confront my own memories and flawed images of Rome with travel literature written a hundred years ago. This effort was not only an intellectual escape from the difficulties of quarantine isolation but also an attempt to use the opportunity to test an alternative research practice.

The guides I discuss in this essay were written in Polish in the early-20th century. The first one is Rome. A Guide to the Eternal City (Rzym. Przewodnik po wiecznem mieście, henceforth described as Rome), which was published in Lviv in 1925 by an unknown author and is 208 pages long. The second work, by Edward Grajnert, is An Artistic and Informative Guide to Rome with a City Plan (Artystyczno-informacyjny przewodnik po Rzymie z planem miasta). Published in 1903 in Warsaw, it has 232 pages and is henceforth described as An Artistic Guide. Both books were retrieved from the Polish Digital Library – POLONA. I chose the two oldest Rome travel guides in the database and intended them to describe Rome at the greatest temporal distance from the present.

My proposal is both experimental and non-representational. ⁷ I read a Polish author whose work has never been translated, and I walked with an imaginary guide in an imagined Rome from the early-20th century. I did not see, walk, or experience Rome with my senses through a material, embodied presence. Instead, I used my memories of being in Rome in 2014 to make sense of these early-20th-century guides of the same city. In doing so, I suggest, a guided ‘armchair tour’ is possible and important for understanding the reading of urban narratives.

What city is this?

In the travel guide Rome, the words food, restaurant, and bar do not appear, but you can see the frequency and centrality of stories about Christianity and Poland’s fate, which represent dominant national religious discourse of the time. ⁸ The description of Rome in this guide is interwoven with narratives about saints and miracles:

St. Michael the Archangel with a sword in his hand once appeared to Pope Gregory W. In honour of this miracle, a chapel dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel with a sword was built on the site of the imperial monument. (p. 110) ⁹

In An Artistic Guide, we find common features of travel guides of this era, as it combines recommendations and warnings with the promise of time well spent:

For various species there are various “Osterye”, i.e. small wineries, often very uninteresting in poor establishments, with wooden tables full of commonness, usually gloomy and not very clean, but having the best domestic wines. (p. 13)

We also discover a number of addresses indicating where the best Roman bookbinders, bookshops, hairdressers, goldsmiths, jewellers, clothes dealers, kitchen utensils, art warehouses, perfume warehouses, and other treasures could be found. The author even gives detailed guidelines for art dealers:

If you want to send some works of art abroad, contact Ferroni’s carpenter, via Rippetta 224, who will take care of everything, including the matter of the official taxi driver’s viewing of the objects, which is currently needed for state control when exporting works of art. (p. 32) ¹⁰

The differences between the two guides, however, are evident in their first paragraphs. Rome’s first sentence is as follows:

On 29 May 1924, Pope Pius XI proclaimed to the entire Catholic world the universal jubilee year of the thousandth nineteen hundred and twenty-fifth, also known as the holy year, lasting a whole year. . . beginning and ending with solemn liturgical rituals, prescribed by the Church, established by old tradition. (p. 5)

Meanwhile, the opening sentences from An Artistic Guide are, ‘Information department. Arrival. The central station, Stazione Termini, is located in Piazza delle Terme’ (p. 1). Between the two guides, I discover two versions of the same city: Rome as a place for Poles looking for traces of Christianity and the bond between Polish history and the eternal city and Rome as a place for the upper class to enjoy life.

As Strauss ¹¹ writes, traditional guides and urban literature (1) use idealization, (2) frame the dispersed experience of urbanity (in the form of a trail or narrative route), (3) present the city’s message, and (4) present and reconstruct personal experience. In Strauss’s ¹² view, the multiplicity of perspectives of the inhabitants must be reduced and simplified in a travel narrative. Travel literature is often like looking from a height and seeing what the author thought embodied and symbolized the city. Travel writers convey this message by using adjectives of comparison and stylistic means such as the categories of authenticity and uniqueness. ¹³ In both guides, there is such an attempt to grasp Rome as a whole, very much reminiscent of my own experience with this city:

The ruins of ancient Caesar buildings are in direct contact with a modern hotel and café, the nearby old Christian basilica is adjacent to a modern warehouse or cinema, and there is a tram stop or a stop for motorised carriages next to the baroque church. This is the general appearance of the city, which with this unusual variety and confusion of separate and often even contradictory things stunts and disturbs. (Rome, p. 68)

A travel guide (as a genre) is more than a collection of information. It presents, more or less openly, the author’s perspective: resident, celebrity, researcher, traveler. I can imagine the authors themselves visiting all the described places with the local guide: after all, there must have been some resident, or connoisseur of Rome, still invisible to the reader, whose knowledge was used to create a compendium of information useful to tourists.

Where am I, and what does ‘turn left’ mean?

I walk in my imagination alone through Rome. I linger on the pages in which I am interested, not the others. Reading gives me the possibility to stop at any time, to take a break. I can also get lost. Intense impressions from reading both texts: Too many names of streets, squares, buildings, and historical figures hinder concentration. After 15 minutes of reading, I am confused and can no longer repeat all the Italian phrases I have read. I’m ‘geographically absent’. Following the text, I cannot unequivocally determine where I am now, in which part of the city. Ignorance of a particular place interferes with my research; I have no possibility of asking my guide to explain exactly what places they have in mind.

Each guide is packed with locational formulation or location categories, ¹⁴ such as ‘we turn right’ and ‘we walk along’. Presumably understood by the author and by readers already familiar with Rome, phrases such as ‘there’ and ‘in that place’ gain meaning in a situational context. According to Schegloff, ¹⁵ location-based phrases can take a variety of forms: geographical references (e.g. address, ‘north-west’ direction), references to specific individuals or groups (e.g. ‘Andrew’s house’, ‘bank headquarters’), or references to activities in specific places (e.g. ‘where we met yesterday’). All these formulations require a certain level of spatial knowledge, which I do not have. I accept not only that I am a stranger but also that I am ignorant about Rome’s geography. Since no one is present at my reading, pays attention to me, or gets irritated trying to explain to me the intricacies of the Roman map, I can enjoy being a guest without the social consequences of being rejected or questioned.

Where did I actually go?

In both guides, the authors give countless details about the visited monuments, such as the year and story of their creation. I am overwhelmed by these details and by geographical names. Actually, without reaching for new data, it is not possible to stay in contact with this material any longer. Having read both texts has made me feel mixed up. I read about cities different from those affected by pandemic – full of art, human effort, evoking the essence of urban life: interesting and diverse areas, vibrant streets and all what is (or was) unavailable during lockdown. Short exercises allowed me to touch on important issues concerning qualitative inquiry, such as the readiness to open up for an experiment in rethinking the relationship between the researcher and informant (walking guide), the need to reach for new sources, and the problem of location categories.

If cultural geographers do not want to remain stuck in isolation from space and society, then our challenge is to go beyond convention, to explore the territory of self, to maintain creativity, and to practice methodological experiments. The experimental reading of old travel guides reminds us that practicing geography also means looking for new spaces for our reflection and constant intellectual training. My exercises in autogeography show that researchers can treat their own relation with urban narratives as a research area. Separating from embodied tourist experiences of space, it is possible to move to distant times, cultures and spaces in reading.