Sociability among the ruins: The colosseum by moonlight, circa 1820

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2017

Abstract

Staring at the freckles on your knees, I missed the whole Colosseum! Daniel Hughes, “A Roma” The conventional fiction of the romantic ruins-viewer is the fiction of aloneness - of being the Last Man, standing heroically alone with one’s deep thoughts and at a distance from the contemporary. But “melancholy among the ruins,” Jean Starobinski’s well-known phrase for the solitary pleasures of the sentiment des ruines, is a strange and contradictory enterprise, deeply rooted in, and fostered by, the very forms of sociability that it wants to reject. Such is the paradox of the Colosseum by moonlight, which rapidly transformed, in the decade or so after Waterloo, from an exclusive destination for foreign travelers who prided themselves on being in-the-know into a locus of conventional touristic practice. In the following pages I train attention on this late-romantic “sociable place,” situating the genesis of the moonlight tour amidst the shifting topography of social class that was integral to the early history of mass tourism. I focus on written accounts produced primarily by British travelers during the period when the Colosseum emerged as a prominent scene of traveling sociability - most clustered around 1820, in which year alone more than a dozen Italian “tours” went into print. By defamiliarizing “the Colosseum by moonlight” (as contemporaries termed it), we can understand it less as a site for the revelation of autonomous subjectivity than as a place where enlightenment and early-romantic sociability attuned itself to a range of middle-class touristic practices belonging to the realm of modern, commercialized leisure. “Travel,” writes Arjun Appadurai, implies “motion of the free, arbitrary, adventurous sort associated with metropolitan behavior,” and the Colosseum by moonlight was, for the late-romantic traveler, a place where this “adventurous” mobility manifested in all its contradictoriness. On one hand, postwar British tourism entailed the translocation of behaviors and the reproduction of social practices. “Go where we may - rest where we will,” joked Thomas Moore in Rhymes on the Road, “Eternal London haunts us still.” Yet the “full moon” in Rome facilitated release from this constrictive world; it “made everything a fairyland,” as Goethe marveled.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Sociable Places: Locating Culture in Romantic-Period Britain

First Page

185

Last Page

204

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