Anna Perenna

She appears when the shutter closes and disappears when it opens — a figure bound to the city's daily rhythm.

Anna Perenna is a mural painted by artist Neve in April 2016 on the rolling shutter of Palazzo Velli in Piazza Sant'Egidio, Trastevere, Rome.

"Anna Perenna" is a mural painted in April 2016 on the rolling shutter of Palazzo Velli in Piazza Sant'Egidio, Trastevere — a palazzo attributed to the same architect as the Uffizi. The surface is not a wall but a metal shutter: the horizontal ribs of the mechanism run through the face like the lines of a music score, present in every photograph, giving the image its particular texture and making it inseparable from the object it inhabits. When the shutter opens, she disappears. When it closes, she returns. Anna Perenna was the Roman goddess of the year's cycle — her name from per annum, "through the year," the perennial. She governed the renewal of seasons, the turning of time, the year that ends only to begin again. Her festival fell on the Ides of March, when Romans went to the banks of the Tiber to celebrate and drink as many cups of wine as years they hoped to live. She was often represented as an old woman — age as the face of endurance, not of defeat. Neve's Anna Perenna is an old woman with young eyes. The face is mapped by time: the lines, the grey hair beneath a veil, the skin that has carried decades. But the eyes are blue and immediate, looking straight out — not the gaze of someone who has withdrawn but of someone who is still entirely present, still watching. She is the neighborhood itself: Trastevere, the oldest living quarter of Rome, ancient in its stones and uninterrupted in its life. The old face that has never stopped looking.