Eat, Pray, Love

izens, and it would take almost twenty centuries before Rome ever recovered the population
she had boasted during her height of glory?
Augustus’s mausoleum fell to ruins and thieves during the Dark Ages. Somebody stole the
emperor’s ashes—no telling who. By the twelfth century, though, the monument had been
renovated into a fortress for the powerful Colonna family, to protect them from assaults by
various warring princes. Then the Augusteum was transformed somehow into a vineyard,
then a Renaissance garden, then a bullring (we’re in the eighteenth century now), then a fire-
works depository, then a concert hall. In the 1930s, Mussolini seized the property and re-
stored it down to its classical foundations, so that it could someday be the final resting place
for his remains. (Again, it must have been impossible back then to imagine that Rome could
ever be anything but a Mussolini-worshipping empire.) Of course, Mussolini’s fascist dream
did not last, nor did he get the imperial burial he’d anticipated.
Today the Augusteum is one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome, buried deep in
the ground. The city has grown up around it over the centuries. (One inch a year is the gener-
al rule of thumb for the accumulation of time’s debris.) Traffic above the monument spins in a
hectic circle, and nobody ever goes down there—from what I can tell—except to use the
place as a public bathroom. But the building still exists, holding its Roman ground with dignity,
waiting for its next incarnation.
I find the endurance of the Augusteum so reassuring, that this structure has had such an
erratic career, yet always adjusted to the particular wildness of the times. To me, the Au-
gusteum is like a person who’s led a totally crazy life—who maybe started out as a housewife,
then unexpectedly became a widow, then took up fan-dancing to make money, ended up
somehow as the first female dentist in outer space, and then tried her hand at national polit-
ics—yet who has managed to hold an intact sense of herself throughout every upheaval.
I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic,
after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could
have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about
who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to
serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough—but to-
morrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum,
one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
Eat, Pray, Love