Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
intersection a mile or so from our apartment: its interior is stripped of ornament; hexagons, octagons, and crosses are planted in the dome; light strips away weight. You walk in, you feel as if you might float out of your shoes.
In Piazza Navona, Bernini’s quartet of wet, muscled river gods, their fingers thicker than my wrists, balance on the rim of their fountain fifty feet east of Borromini’s Church of St. Agnes: it is a 350-year-old architectural showdown. Bernini was theatrical, savvy, and connected; he had eleven children and a self-admitted “inclination to pleasure.” He died rich. Borromini was difficult, confrontational, and constantly out of favor with the papacy. When he committed suicide in 1667, he was almost totally broke.
But in Rome, I’m learning, practically everything is set in opposition to something else—not only its most famous baroque architects, but its founding twins, the crypts beneath its churches, the hovels next to its palazzi, the empires within empires. Alleys rear and twist and cough up their cobblestones like big, black molars. A street one block is called via Carini and the next via Barrilli. F. Torre becomes A. Colautti. Halfway up a hill, Perotti transforms into Marino. We walk the street of light, the street of flowers, the street of crossbow makers. I look up and realize I have been here before. Still, I’m lost. Three nuns in a Jetta wait for us to pass and study the double stroller with gentle eyes.
“I think we go left here,” I say, unfolding the map, and Shauna, shaking her head, leads us right, toward home.
We have days like this: On the way home from the supermarket, towing forty pounds of groceries in a handcart, I step dead center into a big piece of dog shit. Thirty minutes later Shauna drops a jar of mustard, which explodes on the kitchen floor and sends hundreds of mustardy glass fragments shooting across the tiles. Henry needs to be changed, Owen has woken up an hour too soon, a sinkful of bottles need to be washed, four dozen toys need to be put back in their cardboard box.
After dark I sit on the edge of the tub in Owen’s bathroom-turned-bedroom and feed him his nighttime bottle. He sighs; his eyes get sleepy. I rest my toe on the base of his crib, and suddenly the entire side rail splits apart, slats falling everywhere. A half hour with Super Glue while Shauna bounces both infants, and finally the crib holds together and we lower in our son, and all night I lie awake and wait for the sounds of splintering.
Then we have days like this: I’m pushing the stroller when I see one yellow rose, plump and spotless, blooming thirty feet above the street on top of the Aurelian wall. The moon rides above Borromini’s perfect clock tower on the via dei Filippini; in St. Peter’s Square (really an ellipse), I sit between the trunks of pillars in Bernini’s colonnade and write in my notebook beneath stripes of purple sky.
We cook hamburgers made from veal. We make a disastrously good tomato soup and shave half a pound of Parmigiano into it. We drink $4 bottles of Chianti. We buy lemon-flavored yogurt in little bell-shaped jars sold at a dairy down the street and feed our boys shining white spoonfuls.
I put my name onto another sign-up sheet. This time Shauna stays home while I get to creep with some other Academy fellows up the spiral staircase inside Trajan’s column, a privilege that requires a permesso, months of carefully phrased correspondence, and a giant brass key. The column stands near the Vittoriano and is made from twenty marble drums, each around forty tons, stacked on top of each other one hundred feet high, carved on the outside with a 650-foot-long spiraling frieze detailing Emperor Trajan’s various exploits: Trajan addressing troops, foes fleeing villages, fortifications being happily constructed. It is his ratified history, his political billboard, his public memoir. Earthquakes, windstorms, a half dozen military occupations—in 1,893 years, nothing has toppled it.
Another monument to ego that has become, over time, a monument to craftsmanship and wonder itself, such as the obelisks, Augustus’s sundial, or the triumphal arches marking the Forum. For me it does not conjure an image of Trajan nearly as much as it conjures an image of the promenade of all that Carrara marble: eight hundred tons of it, sailed down half the coast of Italy, barged up the Tiber, carted through the heaving, crowded streets, the straining horses, the creaking ropes.
A little door at the column’s base opens; five or six of us duck to enter. We climb one by one toward a tiny railing at the top. One hundred and eighty-five steps. It smells like cold limestone and mildew. The tiny windows, one every quarter turn, show only sky. There is graffiti in there four times older than the United States. And to the visitors who put it there, Trajan’s column was already ancient. I creep out the trapdoor on top and stand at the brink of a cliff: the column invisible below, the ruins of the various forums spread in front. Everything is solemn and sparkling: the lost temples and shells of markets, the hard-won stones of Empire imperceptibly resolving themselves back into the earth.
“Headlands are laid open to the sea,” Pliny wrote, “and nature is flattened. We remove the barriers created to serve as the boundaries of nations, and ships are built specially for marble. And so, over the waves of the sea, Nature’s wildest element, mountain ranges are transported to and fro.”19
I think: Idaho will never look the same. I think: Maybe what glitters in the air above this city are souls, so many of them rising from this same earth that they become visible, get shuffled around in the wind, get blown thirty miles west, and settle across the shining plains of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Thanksgiving: our first as parents. Giant silver clouds fly above the terrace. Sudden shocks of light avalanche through the windows. Seconds later the shadows return. Rome: a contest between sun and shadow, kingdom and time, architecture and weeds. The shadows will win, of course, and time, and weeds. But this morning the match seems close.
I let Shauna sleep in, zip the boys into their thick blue fleeces, and carry them down the stairwell. I push their stroller past the Porta San Pancrazio, down Carini, down the Street of the Four Winds. It is odd to see shops opening and commuters racing to work; it is my first Thanksgiving, I realize, outside of the United States.
At the bakery there is a small triumph: no queue. Men slide big stainless trays in and out of racks. I ask for four croissants and four pieces of pizza rossa, small, cheeseless squares of crust, paper-thin, brushed with tomatoes. A baker crouches and waggles a flour-white finger at the boys: “Buongiorno!” Before we leave, three of his coworkers have joined him, sitting on their heels and admiring the babies to one another.
We head not back home but for the bus stop. Cats slink behind Dumpsters. A man on a balcony waters geraniums. Through an open window, one floor up, I see a woman in her kitchen scrubbing carrots with a yellow brush.
A half dozen Romans stop me: “They are twins?” “How many years do they have?” “Where did you buy that stroller?” Half my Italian vocabulary has to do with baby gear.
Near the vegetable market we pass a man holding hands with a little girl. She gazes at the boys with a bright, impersonal wonder. Her father whispers something to her as they pull even with us; she laughs; it is as if skeins of love are passing invisibly between them. And suddenly the gulf between me and the Italians of the neighborhood seems navigable—I want to follow the man and his daughter and ask them things. Which of these buildings do you live in? What could I cook with this zucchini I’ve bought? Have you seen the Orologio of Augustus?
But I don’t, and soon they are a block away. All I can manage are smiles and sentence fragments anyway. I try a “Buongiorno” on the guard outside a bank and he scowls back, fierce and ridiculous all at once, his big handgun looming on his hip. Beneath the window of a wine shop, two stores farther along, someone has spray-painted, in English, BUSH GO HOME.
Barricades reemerge: language, culture, time. To be a nonfluent foreigner is to pass through one gate only to find yourself outside two more.
I wrestle the stroller onto the #75 bus. It rattles down switchbacks into Trastevere; it groans across the Tiber. Owen coos and moans. Henry sucks his pacifier. After maybe three more stops, I wheel them off in a neighborhood called Testaccio, near the metro station. I ring a bell outside what I hope is the Protestant cemetery, one of the oldest continually used burial grounds