Anthony Di Renzo’s book, Pasquinades, due to be released on October 28, is an illuminating journey into ancient Rome where we learn that nothing new is ever really new—certainly not social media, graffiti, and bitter barbs written on public monuments in the dark of night “describing their contemporary leaders in less than heroic terms”.
“Dissolute Renaissance princes, popes dripping with bling, bloated political figures from the Borgias to Berlusconi— all have been smacked in the face with verbal pies by anonymous members of the Roman public”.
These “talking statues” became the repository and chronicle of the zeitgeist of their era—the collective sentiment of the people’s lived experiences.
Di Renzo has chosen to write a book about the most famous of the talking statues, Pasquino, collecting a series of essays that he wrote as columns from August 2013 to December 2020 in L’Italo Americano, a bilingual newspaper based in Los Angeles. The essays have been revised, expanded, and collected in this book for the first time.
Pasquino has not outlived his relevance or usefulness, as even today people post gripes to a nearby bulletin board. In English, a pasquinade has come to mean any sarcastic pronouncement made with an amusing turn of phrase.
It turns out that the kind of anonymous bravado—though with less wit– that fuels today’s social media is not a new phenomenon after all. Before there was Twitter, Facebook and others, there was Pasquino in ancient Rome. Romans were no strangers to posting their opinions critical of leadership for the public to see, typically scrawled in graffiti on alley walls or in many cases, on the pedestals of statues like this one. Pasquino was not the sole recipient of the Romans’ fiercest whines, there were several other “talking statues”, forming a network of public discourse. These statues collectively earned the nickname “The Congregation of Wits.”
Di Renzo’s book illuminates not only the beliefs, protests and grumbles of Romans, but offers insights into our own discontent.
But the book is not only about their gripes and grumbles, as parallels are drawn to today and the origin of festival days and Italian favorite foods are traced back to the kitchens of emperors and literary figures. He explores how modern religious observances have evolved from ancient Roman beliefs and pagan rituals and simultaneously sheds light on the past and the present.
Di Renzo is a novelist as well as an accomplished essayist, and a scholar of American and Italian American history and literature at Ithaca College in Central New York. In this book he draws on all these related genres to produce an enjoyable read that manages to entertain and inform.
