When in Rome (1970): With Ngaio Marsh at the Villa Giulia

I had never been to Rome, that teeming aggregation of antiquities to which all roads ostensibly, and, as it appears, inevitably lead.  Eventually, that is.  Years of German high school Latin, drummed into me at a school not far from the Roman outpost of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (Cologne), did little to raise my curiosity sufficiently to make me hit one of them.  Those roads, I mean, or, for that matter, any books on the destination that proved final for Daisy Miller, who caught Roman Fever traipsing around the ruins that Mr. Stone never got to see, having perished in transit so that his missus, Mrs. Stone, might experience, at his expense, the Roman Holiday of a Roman Spring.

As eternal as the standard admission lines to its main attractions, the Italian capital lingered on the bottom of what, by now, has turned into a bucket list of sights yet to see, a catalogue of places to die for that reminds me of nothing more forcefully than my ever-dwindling supply of vitality.  The adage that Rome wasn’t built in a day does no longer make my inclination to take things slow seem like a virtue, much less an option.

Although I was not exactly fit as a fiddle while Rome burned in the sweltering spring of 2026—an unseasonable reminder that our insistence of ticking off items on our must-see lists might well contribute to our species kicking the bucket before long—I nonetheless returned with the nagging question why it had taken me so long to visit.  So long, apparently, that everyone else decided to make the move at the same time and take over the place like a horde of goths—the latter-day sad sacks of Rome—spilling into the Forum.

It was a visit to Cinecittà—the fabled Hollywood on the Tiber—that brought back memories of many a vicarious visit to Rome, none more enchanting than William Wyler’s Ein Herz und eine Krone (“A heart and a crown”), under which title I first experienced Roman Holiday (1953) dubbed in German.  Partly shot, and spectacularly so, on location, the romantic comedy was filmed at Cinecittà, as was Wyler’s 1959 epic Ben-Hur and its 2016 remake, along with countless Italian pictures, from the Telefoni Bianchi comedy romances of the Mussolini era to the fantasies of Frederico Fellini, who referred to Rome’s film studios as an “ideal place” that “replaced the world” for him.

The question is rhetorical, and it leads me in a roundabout way to When in Rome (1970), a murder mystery by Ngaio Marsh, without whose mention of it I would not have visited the Villa Giulia.  The Villa houses the National Etruscan Museum, the world’s foremost collection of Etruscan art, of which the tomb effigy of Sarcofago degli Sposi—the Sarcophagus of the Spouses—is the most celebrated.  It is at its feet that Marsh’s mystery opens:

Barnaby Grant looked at the Etruscan Bride and Bridegroom who reclined so easily on their sarcophagal couch and wondered why they had died young and whether, as in Verona, they had died together.  Their gentle lips, he thought, brushed with amusement, might easily tilt into the arrowhead smile of Apollo and Hermes.  How fulfilled they were and how enigmatically alike.  What signal did she give with her largish hands? How touchingly his hand hovered above her shoulder.

“—from Cerveteri,” said a guide rapidly.  “Five hundred and thirty years before Christ.”

“Christ!” said a tourist on a note of exhaustion.

The party moved on.  Grant stayed behind for a time and then, certain that he desired to see no more that morning, left the Villa Giulia and took a taxi to the Piazza Colonna for a glass of beer.

The sacrality of the tomb and the welcomed restorative of plain and unadulterated yeast-fermented malt.  A visitor’s open questions and a guide’s definitive yet perfunctory answers to questions unasked.  The enthusiasm and the exasperation at the sight of yet another relic.  In its yoking of opposites, Marsh’s opening not only sets up a complex whodunit to the untangling of which the Sarcofago degli Sposi is made crucial but also invites us to consider the relationship between puzzle (the solvable and finite) and mystery (the unresolved and infinite) that delimits and potentially expands the boundaries of detective fiction of which the art and culture of the Etruscans may be read as a metaphor.

A suppressed and subsequently dismissed civilization, the Etruscans were so obscure in the twentieth century that its customs and language became the stuff of mystery, a culture on whose burial sites, on death itself, future generations’ rudimentary understanding of it came to rest.

“[A]s everyone knows,” D. H. Lawrence remarked from an anxious and uncertain interwar perspective in Etruscan Places (1933), the Etruscans

were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days, and whom the Romans, in their usual neighbourly fashion, wiped out entirely in order to make room for Rome with a very big R.  They couldn’t have wiped them all out, there were too many of them.  But they did wipe out the Etruscan existence as a nation and a people.  However, this seems to be the inevitable result of expansion with a big E, which is the sole raison d’être of people like the Romans.

Consequently, Lawrence declared “we know nothing about the Etruscans,”

except what we find in their tombs. There are references to them in Latin writers.  But of first-hand knowledge we have nothing except what the tombs offer.

So to the tombs we must go: or to the museums containing the things that have been rifled from the tombs.

As Etruscan scholar Richard Daniel De Puma has pointed out in his survey Etruscan Art in The Metropolitan Museum (2013), the “Etruscan language was an enigma until a few decades ago,” which contributed to the “creation of the ‘mystery’” that enshrouded this ancient civilization.

In Marsh’s novel, the solution of the crime—or one of the crimes—hinges on the reading of an “Etruscan smile.”  The bride and bridegroom at the Villa Giulia come alive as a couple of suspects—that is, a suspicious alike couple—in a case of murder in which one of the dead bodies ends up in a sarcophagus.

They stood side by side admiring the sculptures.  Their likeness, already noticed by [Barnaby] Grant, to the Etruscan terra-cottas of the Villa Giulia startlingly declared itself here.  It was as if their faces were glasses in which Apollo and Athena smiled at their own images. Sharp arrowhead smiles, full eyes and that almost uncanny liveliness — the lot, thought Alleyn.

For the title of her novel, Marsh adopts the fragment a proverb, attributed to Saint Ambrose, that has remained in such continuous use as to require no completion.  The phrase serves Marsh as a challenge and an opportunity alike.  A challenge to immerse herself in the setting to a degree that it becomes a character, to a much higher degree than, say E. C. R. Lorac had imbued Murder in Vienna (1956) with an atmosphere of post Second World War crime and corruption as explored so memorably in Graham Greene’s film treatment turned novel The Third Man (1948; 1949; 1950), it was also an opportunity to let go of the conservatism Marsh had grappled with but not overcome in her previous two novels.

In Death at the Dolphin (1966) her conservatism took on phobic dimensions, whereas in A Clutch of Constables (1968), postcolonial xenophobia was confronted as full on as Marsh would permit herself, even as her attitude toward women remained far from feminist.  With its locale outside the Commonwealth and informed by her own recent experience of the city, When in Rome, allowed Marsh to loosen up and look somewhat less judgmentally at the bewildering incongruities of modernity—from nightclubbing under the influence of recreational drugs to the distant noise of student protests—in surroundings steeped in history and tradition.

Marsh, who visited Rome in 1968, was not alone in availing herself of Etruscan enigmas for the purpose of re-inspiriting the murder mystery, a genre well past its golden age, or of pushing it beyond the age of Empire in which it thrived by suggesting that, when in Rome, look for the Etruscans.  Released one year prior to When in Rome, Michael Gilbert’s Etruscan Net (published in the US in 1970 as The Family Tomb) makes even greater use of the mystique of ancient culture of Etruria by pitting an Etruscan scholar against an enthusiast of the “Etruscan way of life” in whose house an “Etruscan orgy” is staged.

“We know too little about the Etruscans,” Gilbert’s protagonist infuriates his host,

to be certain of anything.  But I would say, on the evidence available, that they were a nation who preferred to pay other people to do things for them, rather than doing them for themselves. A Greek gentleman could compose a set of verses, play a musical instrument, or run a mile in the games. We’ve lost the Etruscan language, so we’ll never know about those verses.  But we do know that the Etruscan had his music played for him, by slaves, and his sports performed by professional gladiators.  Wouldn’t you agree, Professor Bartolozzi?

Romantically and personally invested in all things Etruscan, real or imaginary, the Professor does not.

More than the Etruscans or the rise and fall of any ancient civilization, what fascinates me is where ideas, concepts and our words for them come from, how they spread, disappear and reemerge in whatever shape or context.  What frustrates me is that many writers, especially academics, tend to obscure the origins of their research, some of which are so personal and random as to compromise the image of scholarly rigor they aim to project and preserve.  Would any self-respecting academic confess to being prompted by a murder mystery to visit a major collection of Etruscan art?

Luckily, I am not a self-respecting academic.  My days in academia are behind me.   Without Ngaio Marsh, I would not have visited the Villa Giulia.  And even though I read When in Rome only immediately after my return from the “Eternal City” (the 672-page omnibus edition containing the novel being too clunky for a slot in regulation hand luggage, economy class), a quick scan of Marsh’s novel online alerted me to the Etruscan aspect of her Roman mystery.  Nothing amounting to knowledge or sustained engagement, it is as fleeting as an “Etruscan smile,” a superficial semblance and a self-conscious wink.

Now, the Sarcofago degli Sposi, which is currently being restored, piecemeal, did not present itself to me in its most glorious state, to say the least.  The faces of the bride and bridegroom were pasted on reproductions that would not have held the gaze of Barnaby Grant or prompted the speculations of Roderick Alleyn.  Then again, I owe so much of what I experience to second-hand exposures: a superficial semblance and a self-conscious wink.  I am, after all, a product of postmodernity.

Weaned on simulacra, fed by the substitutes of reality that fuelled the Pictures Generation, and accustomed to what Umberto Eco (or his translator, rather) termed Travels in Hyperreality, I do not presume to know any and all ways Roman.  My mind is just roaming.  Always.