In Rome there are a million or so. When they’re twirling above the rooftops, hardly anyone seems to notice. Outside the bookstore on Largo di Torre Argentina, where almost every night a flock performs arabesques above six umbrella pines, I am usually the only person on the sidewalk looking up. The few Romans who do pay attention want them gone. Volunteers torture a couple of birds, record the distress calls, then walk laps of the train station broadcasting the recordings through megaphones.
Imagine what the birds hear! Strange voices shouting, Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! It doesn’t appear to scare them off.
In front of me, in front of Owen, ten thousand birds swerve, check up, and float. Then they plunge. A tourist at the railing asks, in English, “Who’s the leader?” but no one answers. Knowingly or not, we all stand there taking our auspices, reading the omens of the birds. The real question, the one that keeps me coming back to this railing, night after night, is Why do they bother to be so beautiful?
Starling, earthling. How little we understand. Nero had a starling that spoke Greek and Latin.26 Mozart kept a starling in a cage beside his piano.
On the street beside me Owen hums as he drinks his milk. He explores the texture of his backpack with his fingertips; he blinks his big eyelids.
We nail a wreath to our door. We buy a two-foot-tall Douglas fir in a pot and balance it on top of the stroller and push it the mile and a half home. We eat pizza rossa by the kilogram; we buy shortbread cookies so rich with butter they eat through their paper bag. After a storm, a rainbow of water bottles and soccer balls gathers beneath the spillway beside Tiber Island, spinning and spinning in the foam. In the Campo dei Fiori a man pokes pigeons off the awning of his newsstand with the end of a broomstick, and the statue of the heretic Giordano Bruno, burned alive here in 1600, broods under his big bronze hood.
In Trastevere we are walking down via della Lungaretta, a long alley lined with pen and bracelet and DVD salesmen, when a man on crutches stops us. He is absorbed in the stroller; he pinches tires, examines straps. By now my replies are automatic.
“So you did not buy it here?” he asks. His foot, ankle, and shin are in a plaster cast.
I want to say, “There’s always the Internet,” so I try, “Ecco sempre l’internet,” which is more like, “Here, forever, the Internet.”
“My wife,” he says, “she is pregnant with twins.”
“Ahhh.”
He sighs, tapping one crutch against the cobbles. “And we have another daughter.”
I translate for Shauna. She congratulates him.
“It is a blessing,” he says. He looks past our heads, down the alley, not smiling. He seems more likely to call his broken ankle a blessing. We walk together awhile, his cast swinging back and forth between the crutches. His name is Marco. They have two bedrooms in their apartment and are not sure where they’ll put the babies.
“Is it so much work?” he asks, and we laugh and say, yes, it is. Molto lavoro. Much work. When we reach the end of the alley, we say good-bye and he disappears into his apartment with a wave.
There is a circle of understanding, an unspoken fellowship, between parents of multiple babies. Two days ago a Roman mother grappled her twins onto the tram at Largo Argentina, one baby clipped to her chest and the other in her arms. She flipped her hair out of her face and her gaze took in Henry and Owen, the stroller, me, and for a half second our eyes met. Something in my heart flared. I thought, Hang in there. You’re not alone.
By mid-December the air in the shadows has grown painfully cold. Hardly any Italians bring their children outside. In the Villa Sciarra, a children’s park near the Academy, where stone fauns and nymphs stand frozen in the basins of fountains and two peacocks strut inside a chain-link aviary trailed by dozens of pigeons, we are often the only parents strolling our children.
Virgil claims in the Aeneid that the early Romans tossed newborns into freezing streams to “harden them,”27 but the few baby carriages we see in winter contain infants buried in snowsuits and down comforters, not so much a baby at all as a pillow with a head and two mittens and two shoes stitched on the corners. On buses older women slide the windows shut as soon as we wheel through the doors. In the supermarket a woman in an ankle-length parka watches us bag groceries, then gestures at the boys and asks something like, “You’re taking them outside?”
How does she think we got there? It’s only forty degrees Fahrenheit, after all. Try this sometime: Park a stroller in the shade in Rome in the winter. Within a minute an Italian mother will stop. “They must be put in the sun,” she’ll say. Once a pair of ladies took the stroller out of my hands and wheeled it thirty feet across a piazza and positioned it themselves.
Either Virgil was lying or the Romans have gotten soft. We dress the boys in hooded sweatshirts, fleece jumpers. We draw glances of horror. We are parenting daredevils.
A week before Christmas we leave the babies with Tacy. Shauna wants to play “bus golf,” climbing on and off public buses at random. A man inks detailed caricatures of John Malkovich outside a restaurant. A department store sells only garments for nuns and priests, embroidered chasubles, purple stoles, nun raincoats, nun luggage. A bakery on via della Luce in Trastevere is a holy land of cookies, cookies on trays, cookies in cases, cookies piled on plates.
A bus pulls up and Shauna drags me onto it; we ride it two stops and she drags me off. We nibble chocolate bars in various transepts. In the florid, late Renaissance church of the Gesù, a jumpsuited repairman climbs into the organist’s nest and shines his flashlight across soaring clusters of pipes. On via Giulia, a long, straight avenue jammed with antique shops, a very old man with eggshell skin fiddles with his window-front crèche for fifteen minutes, repositioning shepherds and sheep, adjusting a miniature waterwheel.
Around dusk, we drift off a busy street into an open courtyard and pass through another open door into the most amazing church I have ever seen.
You notice first how white it is. A few railings are touched with gold, but all the rest is white: white six-pointed stars, white windows, white balconies. And you notice how unlocked it feels, free of pillars and registries and choir stalls and auxiliary chapels. Strands of sunlight lean through two of six high windows. It seems less a church than a tabernacle, less a temple to God than a temple to light.
The floor plan is two equilateral triangles, one superimposed on top of each other, a Star of David with the lines blown inward. As the walls rise, the segments of the triangles produce a series of elaborate convexities and concavities. I feel dizzy, I brace myself against the back of a pew. We are enfolded in the creamy white interior of a stomach, staring up and up into a tightening throat.
Our guidebook says it is called Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. By Borromini. Which makes sense, as it is clearly related to Saint Charles at the Four Fountains. I read its little paragraph aloud. Completed in 1660. The interior is stucco. The dome is inspired by earlier depictions of the tower of Babel.
“That’s all?” Shauna asks.
“That’s all.”
She blinks. “It deserves four hundred pages.”
We sit in a corner and try counting the six points of the star as the architecture climbs toward the lantern, but we quickly get dizzy and lose count; we are honeycombed, we are trapped inside the molecules at the center of a snow crystal. The pews, the crucifix, the dwarfed altar—they all seem completely irrelevant. It is all space, all geometry, all ceiling. In the restless walls I glimpse patterns: mountains and streams, snow blowing across a freeway, a train of climbers winding along the edge of a glacier. Everything forms and re-forms. We sit on our little bench and feel the church coil and twist above us, a wintry heart, a tornado of plaster.
Night falls. We walk out woozy. In the bus windows, on the way home, all we can see are the reflections of our own pale, startled faces.
Dust settles over the notes for my novel. I send off a book review for the Boston Globe and sit in the Academy library and feel the suction of Rome, its restless
ness, its dreams. I start a journal entry about Sant’Ivo, thinking I’ll spend ten minutes on it, explain the church to a notebook, then go up to the studio and start in on some fiction. Four hours later I’m still in the library, reading about construction projects in the seventeenth century. Borromini’s patrons were so doubtful that the spiraling lantern atop Sant’Ivo would stay erect that he personally guaranteed the church for fifteen years. Rare stones were in such demand that architects fought over them; for centuries stonecutters had been slicing apart granite and porphyry columns salvaged from ancient buildings to use as church pavements.
Every era here, it seems, cannibalizes the previous one; everything is salvaged, recouped, reclaimed. After Nero committed suicide, the 121-foot statue of himself that he’d erected in the entrance hall of his two-hundred-acre pleasure palace soon had its head retooled to resemble succeeding emperors. The massive fourth-century triumphal arch of Constantine, still standing today near the Colosseum, consists mostly of stone and decoration plundered from monuments erected by previous emperors.
Imperial Romans took culture from the Greeks, infrastructure from the Etruscans, obelisks from the Africans. The Vandals in AD 455 stripped the Roman temple of Jupiter of all its bronze and used it to adorn the palace of their king. In AD 663, the Byzantine emperor Constans II tore the gilded roof tiles off the Pantheon and shipped them back to his own residence in Constantinople. Renaissance architects used ancient Roman supports to rebuild aqueducts and dug up imperial travertine for their churches. In one day in 1452, more than two and a half thousand cartloads of rock were supposedly pried out of the Colosseum and carted over to the construction site at St. Peter’s. Meet the new temples, same as the old temples.
The bronze gilding on the Pantheon’s portico outlasted the roof tiles by 950 years until, in 1625, Pope Urban VIII melted it down to cast the Baldacchino above St. Peter’s altar. With what was left over, he allegedly made eighty cannons.28
The marble on the façade of the Fontanone, just down the hill from where we live, came from the Temple of Minerva in the Forum, the eighteen-hundred-year-old columns hauled up the Janiculum, the slabs sawed apart, refashioned, and reset. Bernini took columns from the fourth-century Baths of Diocletian to use in the bell towers in front of St. Peter’s in 1638; they were taken out eight years later, when the half-finished towers were demolished.
This city swirls with stories—the deeper into the library stacks you go, the more stories spiral up around you. One pope’s nephew beats another pope’s nephew at cards in 1485 and the winnings finance the construction of the Cancelleria, a three-story palace just off the Campo dei Fiori that is the size of a city block. Can this possibly be true? Does it matter?
Here’s something you can spend a day considering: At least 220 plaster flowers the size of patio tables hang from the underside of Michelangelo’s cornice of the Palazzo Farnese, staring down at whoever cares to look up. Not one of these flowers is the same as any other. How long would something like that take?
Here’s something else: most of the ancient temples, monuments, and statues here were originally painted. The color of classical Rome was not chalky white but electric blue, strawberry blond, sunshine yellow: a seven-year-old’s coloring book, magenta temples, violet skies. An exhibit at the Vatican called “The Colors of White” displays a stone lion as its sculptor supposedly intended: cobalt mane, pink nails, green irises. See a bust of Caligula with hazel eyes and coral lipstick; see Venus de Milo with eye shadow and crimson nostrils. Think of it—the frieze entwined around Trajan’s Column used to be a 650-foot spectrum of maroons and golds: each foot-high soldier, each tree trunk, each legionary ship, all the way up to the top, carefully colored in.
Rumor is, St. Peter isn’t buried beneath the Vatican after all, but on the Janiculum. Or in Jerusalem. Rumor is, the biggest obelisk of all—a fourteenth obelisk—is buried somewhere beneath the Pantheon.
I see too little, know too little. I will never know a tenth of it. A scholar could spend a decade studying Rome’s weather vanes, another studying archways, a third studying baptistery doors. And how far would she get?
Three months ago I climbed off an airplane into Rome in 2004 with a novel I thought I could write. Now where am I? And when? I blink, I breathe; the spines of the books around me seethe and rustle, each a chronicle of someone’s mind, a brain that has washed into this city like a wave and broken itself against it.
Tacy looks after the babies; Shauna and I spend an evening Christmas shopping. On the walk home it is raining in St. Peter’s Square and we duck into the basilica to warm up. The pews are full and a crush of young people crowds the center aisle, students, perhaps. They hold up cell phones, cameras. Flashbulbs snap. A pewter crucifix on a pole floats past their heads, making for the altar.
Near the back of the crowd I set down our shopping bags and lift Shauna by her hips. She narrates: It’s a procession. First come a half dozen Swiss guards in their mustard and blue, then some men in suits, then cardinals in scarlet. The crowd presses in behind us, whispering, clicking. “è qui,” they say. He’s here.
A couple years ago Shauna’s mother and I were walking down Thirty-seventh Street in New York, on our way to a book reading, when Denzel Washington stepped out of a building and stopped maybe five feet in front of us. Across the street, behind a cordon, a group of women started screaming, “Denzel! Denzel!” Denzel looked up, waved. For a minute or so he consulted a sheet of paper while someone knelt and fed a wire up the back of his jacket. A camera rested on a crane nearby, folded like a sleeping insect; a truck hosed down the pavement. We had stumbled into a film shoot.
What was strange was that Denzel Washington’s face was so completely familiar that I had to stop myself from clapping him on the shoulder. Denzel, it’s me! How’ve you been?
When Pope John Paul II eventually comes down the central aisle of St. Peter’s, the urge is the same. He is carried in a big upholstered chair, and everyone stretches onto their toes, and as I strain to lift Shauna even higher, I catch a one-second glimpse of the pope as he passes between two shoulders. He is twenty feet away, wrinkled and tired-looking, the stem of his neck drooping. His chin bobs against his chest. His profile is sharp and his eyes are soft. He is utterly familiar. It is a face I have seen a thousand times. More, probably. He has been pope since I was four years old. And the impulse is to announce our presence: John Paul, it’s me! It’s us!
Then he’s out of sight. I set down Shauna. We are two in ten thousand anyway. In under a minute the pope is installed near the Baldacchino, a white figure in a chair fifty yards away, and someone has begun speaking into a microphone in breakneck Italian, and we go back out into the rain.
The winter solstice is Shauna’s birthday. I take the morning off and we eat croissants and walk to an Egyptian glass shop near the Campo dei Fiori a friend has told Shauna about—warren after warren of dusty glassware, greens, blues, yellows, pitchers and platters and chandeliers and whole dungeons of ashtrays. The ceilings are low; the bricks brown with creosote. The shelving appears to be held together with hundred-year-old nails, and there is the occasional crash from somewhere in the basement. We buy a hundred glass flowers at a few cents apiece to string on leather and hang in the branches of our tiny Christmas tree.
In the glamorous shops northeast of there, along via Condotti, little lighted shrubs stand on red carpets. Chocolate cakes and glittering pastries sit on lace inside illuminated vitrines. Louis Vuitton wants €3,900 for a handbag; Hermès is asking €9,100 for a leather coat. We wander up to the Piazza del Popolo, where we watch two elderly ladies, totaling maybe 160 pounds, lean on a railing and dispatch cones of gelato the size of tennis-ball cans. A boy pedals his tricycle while his father pulls him along with the crook of an umbrella handle hooked around the handlebars. Accordions play, and the smell outside a café is of baking bread, dead shellfish, and spilled beer.
To live here is to live partly in a world of fantasy—the twisting lanes, the slumbering
statues, the winter sun small and cold behind the swaying heads of the pines.
On Christmas Eve we carry the babies up the stairs of the Academy and sit with them on the floor of the big living room. The moisture in their eyes reflects the slowly flashing lights of the Academy’s Christmas tree. Most of the scholars and artists have returned to the States for the holidays and the whole building is quiet, devoid of even ghosts, no footfalls, no voices behind doors, no shutters ratcheting up. The library is padlocked; the studios are shut. Indeed, the entire Janiculum seems to be asleep behind the drizzle, a few lights wavering behind hedges, raindrops sliding down the panes.
We fight the boys into the stroller and fight the stroller down the stairs and walk Trastevere in the mist. Only derelicts are out, it seems, a Gypsy girl moaning on the steps of a church, pretending to be lame; a drunk staggering behind us, asking where we come from. (“Finland!” I tell him.) Lights burn behind shutters. Henry sings softly to himself.
In a church near viale Trastevere we park the boys beside a font of holy water and stand in our raincoats through the last half of a mass. Communion, a wafer dipped in sweet wine, is placed directly in my mouth. Off to my left, a plaster statute of Mary glows beneath a cheap-looking crown. As I shuffle back toward the rear of the church, pews ticking past on my right, votives burning on my left, Owen sees me from the stroller and breaks into a smile, and it sets a little bell ringing in my heart.