Beautiful Ruins

The portraits in the pillbox bunker are a reoccurring motif throughout the novel, and they—especially the portraits of the girl—are meant to reflect Dee’s character. Dee takes special interest in them and notes that the two paintings of the girl are not entirely identical. The fact that the two paintings are different but of the same girl mirrors Pasquale’s observation that Dee has “a face that looked so different from every angle” (53). She believes that the girl is the painter’s lover and repeatedly asks Pasquale if he thinks the painter made it home to her. Dee identifies with the girl because she herself is also waiting on her lover, Richard Burton, to return to her. The second time she sees the portraits, she tells Pasquale, “At first it seemed like the saddest thing to me […] that no one would ever see these paintings. But then I got to thinking: What if you tried to take this wall and put it in a gallery somewhere? It would simply be five faded paintings in a gallery. And that’s when I realized: perhaps they’re only so remarkable because they’re here” (273). Dee is beautiful but lacks the qualities of her contemporaries like Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Lauren, and Marilyn Monroe. Just as the paintings do not have the qualities that make them best suited to be in galleries, Dee lacks the qualities to be a major leading lady in a Hollywood film. The paintings hide from the public’s view in an obscure part of Italy just as Dee hides in Sandpoint, Idaho in her later years. Both are lovely things resigned to obscurity and the passing of time.

The Fontana della Baraccia, or the Fountain of the Old Boat, is a fountain near the Spanish Steps in Rome that symbolizes chaos and subverted expectations. The fountain includes a statue of a “sinking boat” (139) that Michael Deane refers to as “the truest piece of art in the city” (139). He explains that this is so because “the artist was trying to capture the random nature of disaster” (140). He says, “His point was this: sometimes there is no explanation for the things that happen. Sometimes a boat simply appears on the street. And as odd as it may seem, one has no choice but to deal with the fact that there’s suddenly a boat on the street” (140). While Michael Deane looks at the boat and specifically thinks of the chaos he finds on the set of Cleopatra, the reader can think of the chaos that abounds throughout modern life. In the 20th century, society awakened the fact that old systems of thought had no explanation for new scientific discoveries and the atrocities of WWI and WWII. Since then, the world appears to be a more chaotic place and people have no choice but to move through it.

A boat in the street subverts expectations just as Beautiful Ruins does. The reader expects certain things based on the tradition rules of certain media like books and film only to be surprised when the rules are not followed and order is absent.