ABSTRACT
In a disturbing scene from his 1983 film Nostalghia, Andrei Tarkovsky has the camera pan across the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, unfolding a gallery of misfits loitering between the imposing columns. We are then shown the face of a man speaking frenetically before the view zooms out to reveal that he is standing on the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. The man, whom the viewers recognize as the recluse Domenico, concludes his diatribe with a rhetorical question: “What kind of world is this if a madman has to tell you to be ashamed of yourselves?” and proceeds to set himself on fire. The use of the madman to reveal some great truth, especially of a divine nature, is a typically Tarkovskian device, one that would have been particularly familiar to his Russian audience. But how has this Russian-like fool traveled to the symbolical heart of the Roman Empire and the spiritual center of Western Europe?
