Old cities are not all like Rome.

Apartment house.

What is it about ancient cities that attracts thousands, millions of people to their gates. Rome is one of those cities, were unlike Athens history and art have been allowed to become one.  Watch over the city at dawn as a curtain is slowly drawn back to reveal a mix of imagination and spirit made one.The Rome I am talking about has nothing to do with people be they citizens or tourists, rather it is the spirit, the physical soul of the place. Unlike many old cities ,the past has not been has not been smothered by the creep of  grey concrete obliterating past gems.

The reason I feel this is that Rome still has that hand made feel about it. The colours of the earth are reflected in the stone, the brickwork, in the detail of its fountains and sculptures. You may dream of one, two thousand years of history without taking a step. This is possible because of the stains of memory recorded on the walls, stones of the city. Every wall has a past, the pox marks of past events, Leonard da Vinci considered the city's walls as works of art. There is no doubt that Rome influenced my own aesthetic vision, I have returned time and time again to history's textures in my creative work.

This is why Antoni Tapies has played such a major role in my imagery, the scored walls, the bullet marks of the Spanish Civil War. This aging of past events while allowing a city to renew itself is what is important in being human. A few years ago on a visit to Barcelona I visited  the Tapie Museum and to my surprise viewed an exhibition of returned postcards from the dead letter office. You could read the feelings, thoughts of all these people from ever corner of the world no matter their location. These undelivered postcards had taken on a life of their own, some had circumnavigated the globe several times in search of a resting place, but the message was kept alive by their very existence.

Romes buildings and sculptures are very much like those postcards, prompting memories of past events both good and bad. They are old enough to present human dreams and aspirations in a way that I don't that another city would be capable of. This eternal quality is something I personally treasure, it is able to transport us beyond the present to the world of dreams.