across the enormous Campo Verano cemetery, a densely cultivated graveyard. Here the fornetti walls were like apartment blocks. There were entire estates, interrupted by subsections with magnificent gravestones and mausoleums, their architecture in keeping with the times, from art nouveau to Bauhaus and the brutalist concrete of the 70s. Apartments, houses, villas, palazzi for the dead, an entire city for the dead, with rich and poor quarters and a ladder-sliding, cleaning, flower-planting memorial staff, and all of it enclosed by the arterial roads, street-car lines, and train tracks of the living.
At last I ended up in the Israelitico section of the cemetery. It was sparser, brighter, less acutely marked by black trees and grave pomp, less severely ordered. The wall that segregated this part of the cemetery was fissured where the grave markers were embedded, the ochre-colored plaster had crumbled away, and small old bricks were laid bare. The name that I came across most often on the grave markers was Astrologo, and I had to wonder which stars over Rome might they have found themselves interpreting. On the graves lay stones and pebbles, a few blanched artificial flowers. Overturned flowerpots, cracked medallions with photographs. There, for the first time, it occurred to me: no matter where they were—in Styrian villages, in Olevano, Tarnów, or here at Campo Verano, by the Tiburtina station in Rome—these sepulcher images were a plea not to be forgotten, an anxious call of the visible, which arose with the invention of photography and wanted to be more powerful than any name. I imagined those who had always been forced to count every penny, who brought what money they had left to the photographer in order to have a picture on their grave. Or those who, already half-consumed by sickness, waylaid the first available itinerant photographer they could find—and the fear of those who had neither time nor money enough. And then there was the task of having this photograph turned into an enamel medallion: a burden placed on the bereaved. What a burden, what sorrow this picture brought about. It wanted to catch the eyes of those who came after at all costs, to shout out to them something that the written word didn’t seem, no longer seemed, capable of expressing.
Cerveteri
I SAT IN THE TRAM watching the cemetery wall glide past, followed by the crumbling facades of rundown houses, then wide boulevards lined with bare trees and climbing grassy stretches, which from far away appeared familiar yet remained nameless. The fractured memories flooding my mind were placeless until I saw the pyramid, and behind it the wall of the cemetery with John Keats’s grave. The pyramid of my childhood memory was different: it was smaller, an endless string of cars driving around it, and at the same time it was a sharper sign than this one. The erector of this tomb ascribed the foreign to himself for all eternity. In Palestrina, while looking at the Nile mosaic, the pyramid hadn’t crossed my mind. The Nile valley had left a trail through Rome—I’d forgotten that.
I continued to Trastevere, where I had arranged a place to stay. The apartment was in a sixties block, as I knew them from films with blonde women wearing big sunglasses and scarves around their heads who would step out of doorways like this one and take a seat on the back of a Vespa. A heavy gate, marble steps. In one corner was a Christmas tree that had seen better days, without lights, only a bit of tinsel still hanging from its artificial branches. A concierge from the Danube delta in Romania pointed me to the elevator and, when I asked, advised me where to buy groceries. The Romanian woman, who wanted to be addressed by an English-sounding name that she had given herself, sat in a small, bright lodge at the end of the dimly lit entrance hall. From there she must have always had the cast-aside Christmas tree in sight, and I imagined that every day she waited for someone to pick it up, carry it into the basement, or otherwise dispose of it. The darkness brought rain and heavy winds, which I had to brace myself against while crossing the intersection at Trastevere train station on my way to the shop. People poured out of buses, trams, the train station, all traveling downhill to the opposite side of the tracks. A nowhere-land began there, with broad arterial roads, supermarkets and apartment blocks, their windows mostly dark. In the obliquely falling rain I lost all sense of the place where I found myself.
At night the wind howled about the attic apartment. Rain drummed against the panes. On the veranda it clattered metallic, perhaps from satellite dishes, antennas, awnings. In the apartment below, a man and a woman talked deep into the night. On rare occasions their voices became louder, more feverish, and had I not occasionally heard footsteps, chairs sliding, silence, I would have thought their conversation was television.
In the morning the wind abated, the rain hushed. Through the rear windows I watched day arrive. Above hill crests the sky turned gray, then pink, and against the light of dawn I recognized the inverted outline of the mountains that from Olevano I would see drawn sharply before the setting sun. After the restless night, during which I had nearly forgotten where in the world—in life—I was, that view gave me a foothold, and even a strange kind of comfort I hadn’t expected. From the veranda high above the Viale di Trastevere, I looked onto the back of the Gianicolo, which now lay in the hesitant orange-red light of winter mornings, just as the old town of Olevano would have. Gianicolo, spoken in my father’s voice—the name was suddenly in my ear, adjusting my map of the surroundings. Rome. Trastevere. En route to Cerveteri. I knew once again where the Tiber was from here, where Ostia was, the Appian Way—places that yesterday had been but threadbare memories, spectres wandering about my mind. I was back at a nameable place.
After returning the keys to the Romanian concierge at the lodge, I took a train to Ladispoli. Standing in a sea breeze which blew through the train station’s small forecourt, I looked up at the apartment blocks in their state of winter abandon, and was whisked away to England. Seagulls, wind, a near-turquoise sky, tiny cotton-ball clouds filled with small blue shadows—suddenly Italy was pushed aside. Perhaps it was the way the light above the salty marsh landscape between the sea and the hills shimmered, as it does above every terrain that can’t decide where it belongs: a flat streak above the high, brackish ground-water table, with the sea and the volcanic hinterland tumbling incessantly around it. If you leaned into the wind at the right angle you might even hear a faint click when the dice collided.
The inland bus arrived, the sea remained at my back, and with it all distant similarities to the sky and light of England. Cypresses and pines slipped into view, along with the round summits of the undulating hinterland. All the same, on either side of the road the country remained for some time a universal land. Nurseries, warehouses, small-scale manufacturers along the highways. Via Aurelia carved a route toward Cerveteri, a gray vein that cast out small bulges of commercial areas, as all arterial roads do, where at other times traffic would surely accumulate, and passers-through would find comfort in commodities.
I never went to Cerveteri as a child. M. and I had planned to take this side-trip, a day in Rome, a half-day on the coast—that’s how we had imagined it. Walking between graves. Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis opens in Cerveteri, with a visit to this necropolis, which, as I now saw, was separated by a kind of small plateau—overgrown with low, brambly bushes—from the city of the living, with its inescapable fortress. This small plain in the winter light, too, was punctuated by tumuli. The field of burial chambers—above which the stone domes arched, covered in lichens, grasses, and wild daffodils—must have been enormous, sheer “second homes,” as Bassani put it, which the living prepared or maintained and looked after for their dead, until one day they themselves moved in. The necropolis, this undulating ocean of overgrown domes, each accommodating a family of the dead, appeared much larger than the city of the living, which lay so silent and seemed so sparsely populated as I stepped off the bus.
Only a small part of the necropolis was accessible, old paved paths led between the grave mounds, with groups of trees in one or two places, tiny groves, to one side an expansive view to the sea, to the hills, past additional sepulcher mounds in the pale grass. I knew exactly how we would have walked between these graves together. How we would have entered the chambers, the stony beds, the chambers, how we would have looked at the things depicted with a near–tender accuracy found in the finely crafted two-color reliefs on the walls—as if that were enough, as if the dead would know to reach through the cool thickness of the masonry and touch the object or animal’s other side, invisible to us, and hold it in their life-averted hands.
The burial chambers were oddly ceremonious, perhaps because here I