The Old Flower Market, Beijing

The city of Beijing took on its current square layout in the Ming dynasty. Taking the Forbidden City as the centre, a street grid was laid out around it emanating out to a high grey wall which encompassed the city in a square. Sections of this wall remain, roughly where the second (of five contemporary) ring road now runs. Were it to have been built on similarly arduous terrain it would be as remarkable a construction as the Great Wall itself. It is wide enough for fifteen people to walk abreast. At regular intervals on the wall the Ming emperors built watchtowers. These are large rectangular buildings, with the long face parallel to the wall. Built of grey Chinese brick with a pagoda roof, they are probably the height of a modern six-storey building. The walls are covered with parallel lines of slit windows, like a cheese grater. From behind these windows archers would watch for the marauding armies of the ever disloyal warlords. The most famous of these watchtowers is, of course, in Tian An Men Square. Its cautionary effect has rather been tempered because its perfect feng shui alignment with the Forbidden City is starkly interrupted by the Mao mausoleum, a perfect acknowledgement that Communism represents a decisive break with China's imperial past.

About two kilometres from Tian An Men to the east at what would have been the South Eastern corner of the city is the next watchtower, called Tung Bian Men. Just outside this stretch of wall, during the Qing dynasty, a flower market came into spontaneous existence. The aristocrats, senior Mandarins and the imperial household would come here not just to buy fresh flowers brought in from the countryside but also to buy handmade silk flowers. According to legend they were the most beautiful and the most well-crafted silk flowers in the whole of China. Small workshops run by master teachers grew up around the main street which was the flower market and for decades it was a hive of industry, employment and community, with those that worked in these workshops and the flower market, living in the streets and hutongs nearby. All that was brought to an abrupt end in the Cultural Revolution when the market was closed, along with all Beijing's markets, the furniture market, the market for horses and donkeys. These were examples of capitalism and rightism and therefore had to be removed from the face of the city.

The neighbourhood fell into poverty without the market and many of the people who had worked in the local industry could not get registrations and jobs in a daan wei because the system then was that you had to be resident in the area to get a job in the factory and you had to work in the factory to get a flat, the combination of household registration (hu kou) and employment effectively excluding the former small business people and craftsmen - as the system was designed to do.

In 2003 the neighbourhood was rebuilt. The old 1950s and 1960s brick flats were demolished and much of the land was sold off to private developers who also had to provide replacement housing for the poor people who had been living there. Attracting the interest of private developers was not difficult. The neighbourhood, by the standards of the modern city is very central, a few minutes from Beijing East station from where the new white bullet trains with noses like dolphins rush from the city to the big cities of China's eastern seaboard. The new homes for sale have been built in high blocks with their south sides glassed over to attract light and heat during the many cold, grey, polluted months of the Beijing winter. In the middle of the blocks is a gated courtyard with a strange sculpture of a flowering cabbage.

On a Saturday morning there are few young couples around, they are too busy shopping and doing chores in their smart new flats. But there are plenty of children, mostly being tended by indulgent grandparents, for whom their sole grandchild is a precious gift to be nurtured and cherished. All grandparents are more lenient than all parents, but when there is only one grandchild, how special must that relationship be. Many of these little emperors have the latest in expensive childhood accessories, including motorised jeeps and scooters which whirr around the square guided by a three year old, kitted out in designer baby wear, complete with baseball cap at a tilted angle. Others are on roller skates. None have nothing. China has changed and who would begrudge these families these luxuries of love and generosity so long unavailable?

The old flower makers are still around too. They now live in small flats, the smallness of them being their principle complaint. Mostly they have televisions and refrigerators, supplied by their children in some cases. But something has been lost. Many old people in China still feel superstitious about living off the ground and there is nowhere amidst these flats for those communal activities that are the mainstay of Chinese community life, Tai Qi and Mah Jongg. In the older communities based around the daan wei there is always a place to gather, gossip, gamble; a place for communal singing, ping pong and exercising. Since the flats were so small and the interiors often unappealing many old people spend hours and hours out and about with friends and neighbours, not so much with families. Many of their children have moved away to find work, some have moved out of Beijing to the cities of the Pearl River delta where jobs are easier to come by, particularly for those with few qualifications, and salaries are higher. But in the old flower market too much time is spent cooped up at home with your spouse and the Pekinese dog for company.

The community is still called the East Flower Community and many of the elderly residents still make silk flowers as a leisure past time. They also make fruit out of glass under the tutelage of the acknowledged expert whom they call Master Grape, because his glass grapes are utterly life like. There is one other echo of their flower-making past. Along the pavement a flower bed has been laid. Plastic grass has been put down and the real stumps of small trees have been stuck into the ground. On to these living branches the local people have attached the silk roses and cherry blossom they have made which will bloom all year round forever - never withering; never dying.

More pictures of the old flower market in its new form on www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Memories of the Cultural Revolution, Dashanzi, Beijing

Victors in war often memorialise their darkest hour, thereby stressing the magnitude of their achievement, not just in winning, but winning from extreme adversity. Hence the British obsession with the Dunkerque landings, which were in reality a brave but ragged retreat. If they had been a precursor of ultimate defeat perhaps they would not now be so celebrated. The Long March has a similar place in the history of the Chinese Communist Party’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang which led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The Long March was in fact a long retreat from the advancing Nationalist troops, ending in the mountainous North East Shanxi province in the Yan’an area. According to the mythology more than 800,000 Communists embarked on the Long March and about 25000 made it to the end. Jung Chang has suggested in her biography of Mao that Mao didn’t do much marching, spending much of the time being carried in a Sedan chair.

In the Dashanzi area of Beijing, adjacent to the hyper-contemporary art zone, 798, a theme park celebrating the Long March and the Shanxi region has been established. You enter a courtyard to the sound of revolutionary songs broadcast across a tinny public address system. Around the courtyard are revolutionary statues and red stars. One of the buildings contains a museum about the Long March and the Yan’an area of Shanxi. Most of the exhibits are photographs of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, including Mao and Zhou En lai. They are dressed in thickly padded and very crumpled Chinese suits, swathed against the cold which would have been extreme, and they look sternly out of grainy black and white photographs against a backdrop of grey mountains. Mao looks haughty and, relatively speaking, well-groomed. Zhou looks determined with a firm expression and that dignified, upright bearing which was so much a part of the grace and style with which he approached foreign relations in his long years as Chinese premier. There are a few exhibits, some chairs said to have been used by Mao, his calligraphy brush and inkpot, the binoculars and leather bag supposedly carried by Mao’s bodyguards. The photos are prints and they are a mix of pictures of meetings, where a crowd of seated participants listen to what one suspects were long-ish speeches from their leaders. The guide tells us all the important decisions about the foundation of the People’s Republic of China were taken in these meetings in the mountains. There are also pictures of the warm reception the Communists received from local farmers. These are, needless to say, wholly unconvincing.

One section of the display contains photographs of Yan’an in the Cultural Revolution. Schoolchildren had been brought to live there and are being ‘educated’ by farmers. The pictures are of meetings, more meetings, and students working in the fields alongside the farmers. We know from the testimonies of people who subsequently emigrated to the USA that, in fact, the children from the cities had contributed little and learnt less. They had been distributed amongst local families, often miles apart across fields and mountains. They had just been another hungry mouth to feed, though occasionally they brought with them useful things like medicines which could be shared.

Suddenly we discover that the group of middle-aged Chinese people in the museum with us are in fact a class reunion of the pupils in the photographs who had been sent to Yan’an in the Cultural Revolution. We get talking to one of them. He looks about 40, thin and dressed entirely in black, on the surface every inch the modern Beijing-er. He tells us he was taken straight from school with a group of his classmates. Taking classes of schoolchildren to the countryside at short – or no- notice was fairly routine at the height of the Cultural Revolution. None of their families came with him. He was about fourteen years old, just at the school leaving age. He points out himself in one of the photographs, an earnest, worried looking adolescent marching along a dusty rural street. In other photos unhappy-looking people have banners around their necks bearing slogans and pictures of Mao. These people are probably being denounced by the Red Guards, but in the photo of the marching students no one is carrying banners, nor are they surrounded by a watchful crowd. We ask him if it had been hard. He looks down at his shoes, wary and evasive but certainly not wishing to be disingenuous, smiling weakly. It had been very hard he says softly. He was there for a few years until he was an adult, working in the fields and ‘learning’ from the peasants. Then he was assigned to a job in a factory in Shanxi province and did not return to Beijing until 1990, by when he was middle-aged. We want to ask what had happened to his family, but the interpreter is becoming anxious and tells us we must be going. “It’s controversial”, he says simply, again combining discretion with a wish not to be dishonest.

Human failings in Budapest

At a conference in Budapest about identity the Eastern Europeans and those from Southern countries still outside the European Union talk only of national and ethnic identities. They talk, paradoxically, about their pride in their reclaimed national identities while claiming ‘there is no problem with minorities in…’. They strongly resent the suggestion that all national identities are coded for violence and carry the implication of inevitable past and future violence. My friends from Kosovo, all Albanian, try to appear dignified in their fresh victory, not gloating or triumphalist. Independence was declared on February 17th with tacit EU and American support. They are keen to stress the spirit of reconciliation; the secular nature of the new state; the protections for the Serb minorities – and how all these high-minded ideals are guaranteed by their aspirations to join the European Union. All talk of tradition, religion, memory, landscape and separate cultures is banished. Inherited identities are too dangerous even to mention. I, rather rudely, point out that it profits a man nothing to lose his soul to gain the whole world, but the European Union? Even more rudely, I predict that the Albanian elite may end up prosperous, deracinated cosmopolitans eager to get the hell out of Pristina to Geneva or Brussels. Meanwhile the Serbs, with their spiritual home (as they would see it) now in the territory of Kosovo will be the only ones with memories and meanings drawn from a rich and troubled past which lives on vividly. The question on the minds of the young politicians, none of them Serbs, is the question of St John of the Cross, Tolstoy and Lenin: what then is to be done?

The Western Europeans listen politely but are probably a little bored and a little impatient with all this national/ethnic old-think, described disparagingly as ‘anthropological’. Waving flags is so over. For them also, but for different reasons, inherited identities are a thing of the past. They want to talk instead about gay adoption, Pop Idol and plastic surgery makeover television shows. Even in Northern Ireland apparently more people attend the Gay Pride parade than the St. Patrick's Day parade. These concerns all seem narcissistic and, sometimes, insufferably smug – the pain of alienation only being the flipside of carefree prosperity. The question for the Northern and Western Europeans is not what is to be done, but what have we become?

In a field outside Budapest is the ‘Statue Park’. It’s not really a park at all. It’s a windswept field, halfway up a hill with ugly views, criss-crossed with power lines. Electricity pylons march unrelentingly across the landscape. Onto this field the Hungarian authorities have towed all the old Communist statues. Lenin, Marx and Engels guard the entry. Inside, statues of a few besuited, bespectacled men represent Hungarian Communist leaders. They don’t look like much of a match for Russian tanks. But the most monumental statues are the ones of anonymous heroes. They are huge, bulging, muscular men in dramatic action poses. They are crudely crafted in the Social Realist tradition and, to our post-modern eyes, have a homo-erotic tinge. The statues of women and children represent symbols of purity and clarity. Strength lies with the men. You don’t have to be an ex-Communist to feel some sadness at the loss of idealism and the descent into an unheroic (cowardly?) era where no one seems willing to fight for anything much anymore. In order perhaps to reduce the sense of complicity and guilt, the park presents Communism as kitsch. The souvenir shop sells mouse mats with South Park-like figures saying ‘They killed Lenin, the bastards.’ Kitsch - and the ironic language in which kitsch speaks - is all that is left. There are no Hungarian visitors to the park and only a few foreigners.

The Hungarian National Art Gallery is popular with Hungarians. The exhibition about the Medicis is crammed. Hungarians are voting with their feet about which bits of their past they intend to validate as part of their contemporary identity. The gallery is in Heroes’ Square and is one of the greatest collections of old masters in Europe. The stars of the show are their collection of Spanish masters and the best of these are the several El Grecos. El Greco’s most important insight in these paintings is a profound understanding of human fallibility and failure. One picture is of the agony in the garden, the sky at dusk showing a red version of that stark, unique El Greco chiaroscuro. In front of the kneeling, praying Christ are the apostles asleep and oblivious. Another picture is of the disrobing of Christ. As in the Gethsemane picture he stares upwards, his face brightly lit, from within and from above, transcending the ugly and violent scene. Behind Christ El Greco has painted two thickset Roman soldiers looking shame-facedly at each other, as if to say ‘We know this is wrong, but what else can we do?’ They are not asleep and unaware. They are awake and active, but don’t seem to have any choice. These pictures of human shortcomings next to the transcendent and translucent Christ move Yvonne to tears. Her tears are not for what we have become, but for what we are.

for pictures of Statue Park, Budapest go to www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

The possibilities of silence in Egypt

All cities are noisy. Cities in developing countries are noisier still. Cairo, so they say, is the noisiest city in the world. Using the car horn to get through traffic is the main offender, but people also say that the Egyptian way of talking is loud and guttural. The latter point is debatable. However, if you are in Egypt for a while you do start to long for silence, so here are a few suggestions of where to find it.

Outside all the big hotels in Cairo which are ranged along the banks of the Nile and on Zamalek Island you can hire a felucca. The best time is sundown. The Nile in Cairo runs almost directly south to north; so on a clear day the west bank is bathed in the most beautiful golden light while the east bank becomes completely dark. The asymmetric effect is disorienting. It’s only a shame that most of the buildings on the river banks are hideous concrete monstrosities – evidence of a dictatorship combining its interests with capitalism. Feluccas rely on sail power and so once you get out into the middle of the river complete silence falls, it’s a very relaxing, hypnotic feeling. At about 5.50 pm, the first distant wail of a muezzin starts up from somewhere. Quickly all the mosques call out to the faithful. Apparently there are 1000 mosques in Cairo and in a few minutes you can hear all of them, each in a slightly different register. The total effect is like listening to a harmonious polyphony in a low volume echo chamber. It is transfixing.

The other place to find a beautiful silence in Cairo is in the Coptic Museum after hours. The Coptic patriarch established the museum when European archaeologists were removing Egyptian antiquities as fast as boats would carry them back to the Louvre, the British Museum and the Pergamon Museum. The Coptic Museum was established to save some of these antiquities for Egypt. It is a beautiful building set around a tranquil courtyard full of date palms and orange trees. The windows are in traditional Egyptian style, covered with dark wooden intricate trellis work, to filter in the light of the sun while keeping out the heat of the day. At sundown the golden light plays through the windows in filigree patterns on the sandy walls. Inside the museum are lovely frescoes from desert monasteries, some of the earliest sites of worship in Christendom. You can see the beginning of the Iconic tradition still strong in the Orthodox tradition. Perhaps even a little hint of the Romanesque, but that might be your imagination.

Christianity is said to have arrived in Egypt in 45 AD, just 12 years after the death of Jesus Christ. Since then the Coptic Church has flourished, waned and flourished again. But it flourishes now and has a special place in the cultural, linguistic and archaeological history of Egypt. The Coptic era is the bridge between Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt and Islamic Egypt. To this day prayers are said in Aramaic, the language of Christ’s preaching. Many of the items on displays are funerary ornaments and feature the dead person laid out with their arms splayed back beside their head, like a baby asleep. They are often set in alcoves of Corinthian pillars with a Coptic cross above showing the long exchange of decorative and religious ideas between Egypt’s great religions, both past and present. This tradition of syncretism, borrowing from past religious and cultural traditions to establish new ones, is a feature of all ancient cultures and societies, including for example India and China. The Coptic tradition does not have the glamour and drama of the Pharaohs and is therefore readily ignored, but it should not be ignored. The pleasures of the Coptic tradition are the pleasures of heartfelt devotion set against a vast historical backdrop going back to the several roots of our civilisation.

The Coptic tradition has been very much revived in the last 150 years or so by enlightened, outward looking Patriarchs and monks. Sadat, Egypt’s second military ruler, exiled the Coptic Pope from Cairo, which is perhaps some kind of compliment. At least he must have been relevant. There are now six million devotees, almost all in Egypt. The sites of the Coptic monasteries in the desert are around the ancient oasis of Wadi Natrun, now a poor and dusty desert town. The monastery of St Bishoi attracts many thousands of devout Coptic pilgrims. It is nearly, but not quite silent. You can hear the quiet sobbing of a troubled pilgrim asking for the saint’s help while family members look on morosely. Who knows what troubles they face, illness, penury – perhaps the Saint can help. The pilgrims gather around the tomb of the saint and stroke the casket, which has been worn shiny by the hands of the faithful. The casket is shaped like a body and has an effigy of the Saint on the cover. The structure and style is not dissimilar to the tombs of the Pharaohs.

You can also hear the Monks praying at small altars behind a curtain with a painting of the Saint. Once they have finished praying they emerge from behind the screen in their long black soutanes and their tight fitting caps which stretch down like veils to their shoulders and flap in the wind as they walk. All have long beards but they have tidily trimmed and squared off at the bottom. They leave the church one by one, still munching the bread broken in the name of the body of Christ in the service. Again silence is not quite possible, because they greet passing strangers cheerfully. They all seem to speak good English:

Monk to tourist: “Hi, how are you?”

Tourist replies: “Fine, thanks. This is a lovely place.”

Monk: “What religion are you?”

Tourist pauses and decides to avoid a long complicated explanation of their doubts and certainties and replies: “Catholics.”

Monk, still chewing bread, replies: “Ah well, you’re the same as us. You have seven sacraments and we have seven sacraments. Anyway, nice to see you.” And he wanders off between the ancient red domes of mud and sand looking down at the ground with his hands behind his back, humming to himself. Silence returns.

The monks are not enclosed and are passionate social actors and agents. An Abbot of one of the nearby monasteries set his monks the target of producing enough food to feed 1000 people each. The monks rose to the challenge and have mastered pinpoint irrigation, greening the desert with, for example, banana trees. They have also mastered bovine embryology; not for them a life of irrelevance and sequestration.

Alexandria, another noisy city, has one or two places where silence is to be found. One is in the basement of the National Museum in Alexandria, one of the most beautiful and - beautifully lit – museums in the world containing a remarkable collection of Greek, Ptolemaic and Coptic artefacts. The basement is a Pharaoh’s tomb. In the centre is the boy God-King’s golden death mask and casket covering his mummy. Another casket is suspended open to show how the intricate designs and hieroglyphics are repeated at each layer of the casket. Statues of Horus, the hawk, and Anubis, the dog, guard the entrance. No living person was ever meant to enter here so take care.

Absolute silence can be guaranteed diving in the Mediterranean. Under the ocean are sphinxes and statues of Pharaohs and Egyptian gods which have been submerged in earthquakes during the long centuries of Alex’s decline during which the great capital of Alexander the Great was reduced to a fishing village. Cleopatra is said to lie somewhere beneath this ocean as her palace was on an island long engulfed by the Mediterranean. Nobody knows exactly where Alexander is buried. His silent sleep, unlike so many of the Pharaohs, is for the moment undisturbed.

Egypt photos at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

A hope of home in Beijing: Akram Khan's bahok

The Akram Khan Company new contemporary dance piece had its premiere in Beijing. The show is called bahok, which is Bengali for carrier. Akram's artistic genius stems from his capacity to create new striking movement sequences, drawing on Indian classical and contemporary dance languages, to convey some more profound truth about a universal experience. In this show the context is journeys and the setting is very simple and totally familiar: people are gathered under one of those signs that you see in stations and airports on which place name, times and messages revolve every few moments. We have all stood staring up at one of these signs waiting for our destination, or feeling apprehensive about some problem which is about to be revealed about the journey we want to undertake. Wanting to get the journey over with, particularly if we are going home.

Over the length of the show the dancers, from European contemporary dance traditions and from the National Ballet of China, configure themselves into pairs and groups and movement is set to some small scene we have all witnessed in stations and airports: someone asleep who keeps tilting and tumbling on to the person next to them; boys arguing about a computer game; someone humming the tune they are listening to on their IPod - all instantly recognisable, but not the movements or the meanings drawn from them in the show: are these people really going anywhere? do they have homes - or destinations? In our world of frantic motion has the business of being on a journey from one place to another - from one identity to another - become an identity in itself? Perhaps if we keep on moving, home isn't a place anymore. Home becomes just an idea, a sentiment, a memory. It no longer has a physical meaning. Home, in Akram's piece, becomes your body and your memories - disconnected entirely from the actuality of place.

These are all the thoughts that go through your mind, but what you are watching is a scintillating display of exuberant, original movement by a fantastic young troupe. That excitement counterposed against the reflections about home and memory that the piece brings to mind, in that juxtaposition of movement and reflection, that's where the power of the work lives - as in all Akram's work.

Watching this in the evanescent streets and spaces of Beijing, which change from week to week and month to month, particularly as the Olympics draw nearer, of course, makes one wonder what Chinese people think of their home now, now that everywhere is so changed. Tian An Men Square is probably the most iconic and notorious space in China, filled with symbols of power and tradition: the Forbidden City; the Great Hall of the People. But right next to the Great Hall of the People a hyper-modern temple has been unveiled. It is shaped like a gigantic half of an egg laid on its side made from silver titanium and glass. The egg sits in a glassy moat, which reflects the other half of the egg. No entrance is visible. The entrance is below ground, under the moat. This building is a dramatic piece of theatre in itself, set against the classic backdrop of Tian An Men Square, and how right that it should be theatrical because it is the new National Centre for Performing Arts.

It is designed to inspire awe in anyone looking at it, awe at the drama of the building, but more importantly awe at the audacity and speed with which the Chinese authorities are embracing modernity in its most extreme variants. Sadly the work performed in the centre will take longer to reach the levels of quality and modernity achieved by the building. The Chinese leaders are rushing to the future, perhaps leaving the people who live in the ancient hutongs behind the Forbidden City wondering if all they will shortly have of their homes are their memories and their bodies.

For pictures of Akram Khan Company's bahok go to www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Modern Rome

Since Rome finds it impossible to shake off all those associations of antiquity that attach to its brand, we thought we would go in search of modern Rome. In the centre of Rome, just off the Via del Corso, is Richard Meier's museum of the Ara Pacis, probably the most important antiquity in Rome, it is the altar Augustus built to celebrate peace; in fact he meant victory. The Museum, like all Meier's contemporary buildings is intersecting slim, sheets of white concrete, set at harmonious angles to glass in the roof and in the walls. The whole effect is simple and dramatic, celebrating all the renunciations and clarity of the modern and setting them against the ambiguities and paradoxes summoned up by all great historical monuments. Tradtional Romans wished for something more, well, traditional, but the effect of the glass ceiling and walls is to bathe the altar in an ethereal light, whilst allowing the person looking at the altar to see beyond into the city and the world. The altar is given its special aura without being disconnected from the city, past and present. If architecture is the relationship between light and space this building is a triumph.

Richard Meier has another amazing building, his Jubilee church built for the Millennium, which for the Roman Catholic church was a Jubilee year. John Paul II, with the audacity for which he was renowned, decided that Rome needed another church (some might say like a hole in the head) - and what a church they got, designed by a Jewish American. It is in the outer suburbs, getting there involving a longish drive from the centre through many underpasses and flyovers. The neighbourhood is undistinguished, apartment blocks like barriers and barracks surround the church. At ground level are the random selection of disconnected shops and bars which Italian town planners never succeed in resisting. In the midst of this the Church soars three parallel, sail-like curved white planes, evoking a dome without being one. The other side is straight and flat and, as with the Ara Pacis, glass intersects everywhere. Inside the church all is light and white, creating, as intended, a heavenly quality. High above the altar is a solitary, unadorned crucifix against a backdrop of sheer white. All the wood inside the church is light and warm and, the organ is set against the light oak, its chrome pipe standing out against wood and white.

The parishioners are standard issue modern Italian Catholics, disproportionately old and poor, many of the men hanging around outside smoking for much of the mass; lots of pushchairs in a country where reproduction has largely been abandoned for the higher pleasures of consumption and lifestyle. The locals seem quite at home in their hyper-modern settting - but all simplicity and clarity quickly unleashes a suppressed force for entropy (it's kind of thermo-dynamic law). The application of the irrepressible urge for disorder comes in the form of cheap indoor plants, distributed around the church, arbitrarily interrupting the clear lines the architect so carefully sought and so brilliantly achieved.

You can find modern art, as well as architecture, in Rome too. No modern art museum is complete without its acronym and in Rome it is MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. The show we saw was an identikit contemporary art show, you could see something similar in twenty European cities. The artist must have several implausibly mixed ethnic origins, there must be a large element of fairly ponderous video and the work should tell the viewer something of the (usually rather banal) passion and horror with which the artist contemplates contemporary society - the personal perspective being apparently easier to communicate than the scientific or technocratic. This show was by a Iranian-Italian and was her animated videos of mankind's confused and horrible relationships with animals and biodiversity. So one video showed a man stabbing an irritating pet dog in his living room. Another longer video described the collapse of biodversity as witnessed by a modern day voyager on a modern day Beagle. This was juxtaposed with a video of a family argument. Geddit?

An even more flash up to date acronymous museum is planned for Rome designed by the Queen of flash modernity, Zaha Hadid, for whom the greatest sin is that a new building might in any way refer to its surroundings. She has that in common with one or two other superstar architects: Frank Gehry; Daniel Liebeskind. The building was scheduled for completion in early 2006. In February 2008 it remained a deserted fenced-off scene of large, angular, grey concrete lumps randomly distributed. The architecture may be modern but Italian builders are apparently immutable. Maxxi is yet to come.

As well as architecture and art, you can encounter the modern in food too. Gusto is a whole collection of food buying opportunities - shops, cafes, restaurants - on the same square as the Ara Pacis. The food is delicious - but all Italian. Another, perhaps even more cutting edge restaurant is in a backstreet behind the Pantheon. Its confusingly traditional name is Trattoria. The restaurant is all pale wood and digital art installations. The kitchen is encased in glass so you can watch Africans and Bangladeshis cook modern Sicilian cuisine. My pasta starter came with oranges, potatoes and deep-fried anchovies - how modern is that? Delicious, actually; from Sicily via Southern California. None of the waiters were Italian. Ours waitress was Chinese and had dyed her hair blonde - a little echo there of life at the cutting edge in London or New York.

But one can't suppress the feeling that Romans have an abiding attachment to their traditional dolce vita. In Gusto and Trattoria only Italian food and Italian wine are sold. Most of the high end fashion shops on the Via Condotti are Italian. A few global French brands make it -Chanel, Lanvin - but the Brits, the Japanese, the Americans are nowhere in sight. If you buy a hat in Rome the shop still has a hand-operated machine for stretching the headband to fit. And perhaps the biggest signal of all are the smoothly dressed elderly Italian men in pastel coloured v-neck sweaters, carefully ironed corduroy trousers and unbuttoned, swinging, pleated green Loden overcoats, leaning close together and muttering to one another as they stroll past an ancient monument with their hands behind their backs. Italians have not - and perhaps will not - embrace the future, why should they?

(Thanks to Paul Docherty for finding the Jubilee church and restaurant recommendations)

For photos of modern Rome go to www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets