Ancient Romans had their baths, of course, colossal and preposterous, big as Umbrian hill towns. The Baths of Caracalla alone covered twenty-seven acres. The Baths of Diocletian were larger, almost twice as large as the nineteen-acre White House complex of gardens and buildings in Washington, D.C. You worked till noon, you wandered over to the baths with your bottle of olive oil and skin-scraper: warm pool, hot pool, finish with a cold rinse.
At the end of the Empire, Roman aqueducts brought 1,747,000 cubic meters of water into the city every day.54 With a population just shy of one million, that amounted to 461.5 gallons per person. Every day.
One ninety-degree afternoon, Shauna and I stop by the northern fountain in Piazza Navona, not Bernini’s huge Fountain at the Four Rivers, but the Fountain of Neptune, the naked sea god poised to sink a spear into a serpent that has coiled a tentacle around his thigh. The basin has been drained. A couple of city workers in jumpsuits scrub the marble with nylon push brooms. Hoses lie fat and listless on the cobbles. “Buongiorno,” we say, but they hardly nod. Everything is withered: dark smears in Neptune’s back muscles, pigeon shit on the nymphs, and it seems as if this end of the piazza has somehow faded, too. No flush; no sparkle. No children, no laughter; the awnings of the cafés hardly flutter; it is as if history is seeping out of the stones, clogging the air, stifling everything.
But soon enough the fountain is refilled, the pump begins to churn, innocence rinses away experience, present overwhelms past, the corpse reanimates. Rome lives again.
By evening, in this heat, the whole city twists into a whirlpool: the humidity, the marshy odor of the Tiber, gasoline fumes swirling in an alley, the clinking of distant tableware—in a Roman dusk in summer you can stare at a fountain and see nothing, feel nothing, all existence reduced to the suspension of water at the apex of its ascent, delayed a millisecond, flooded with light, just before it begins its fall. It is a state to chase after.
Wherever you might be right now, water—the ceaseless hydrant in the Campo dei Fiori, Bernini’s grand old leaking boat in Piazza di Spagna—circulates through this ancient city, thrumming through its arteries, beating in its hearts. Even the engulfing mess of the Trevi Fountain, with its gaggles and trinket barkers and hundred thousand blackened gum circles and fluorescent galaxy of crushed gelato spoons between the cobbles, is somehow essential. It is flushing, always flushing.
We lean over the rail; we hurl pennies at the gods.
I search three department stores until I find an inflatable pool and bring it back to the apartment and blow it up on the terrace. We upend a couple of warm pitchers into it and lower the boys in. Owen squeals with delight, splashing, rolling a ball back and forth. Henry tenses, his little body motionless. He does not cry, but he does not move either. Eventually, without disturbing anything around him, ignoring Owen’s shrieks and splashes, he begins to carefully pour water back and forth from the interior of one LEGO into the interior of another.
Shauna begins keeping our shutters closed around the clock. They are aluminum and black, and by noon the sun has heated the south-facing ones to the point where we can no longer touch them. The city is drugged with heat; the stones are dead; the streets devastatingly quiet. From one until four, no one moves. Shutters are drawn, storefronts sealed—it might as well be 3 a.m. I give the Roman siesta a try, lying on top of the bedsheet, but it’s hopeless. I sweat; little strings of worry pull through my brain, conjectures, to-do lists. I get up, move through the apartment in a gray twilight, reading novels, writing in my journal, stripes of sun blazing between the shutter slats.
Who could write a book in this? How did Pliny do it? From what I can tell, summer pushes Romans to the edges, mornings and evenings, suburbs and summer homes. In the city center, in the heat of a summer afternoon, churches are the only refuges, dim and cool, spots swarming across the floors, the paintings black and impossible, the altars dwarfed beneath dusty chandeliers, tour groups shuffling down gloomy lanes of pillars. I want to stay in these churches for hours; I want to take off my shirt and lie on the marble, my chest against the stone, and let the perpetual dusk drift over me.
Instead I steal mint from the Academy garden and crush it in glasses with sugar and rum, and we sit with friends on our terrace drinking and soaking our feet in the baby pool.
Halfway through June we return from a tiny hill town called Narni, one more Wednesday in Umbria. Rain streaks the train windows and the headlines say, Blood on the Umbrian Highway: 2 Dead. But maybe I’m mistranslating, because two truck drivers burned to death in an alpine tunnel near Turin yesterday, 630 kilometers away. Maybe drivers are dying in pairs all over Italy.
Mosquitoes travel the aisles. A shack in a field flashes past, a dark-faced man staring across a table made from a sheet of corrugated iron. The Tiber appears, green and slow, fringed with plastic bags. Then it’s gone. Shauna sleeps beside me, hands folded. Ahead of us, only a few miles away, our boys chase Tacy around the apartment. The train slows as it rattles into Tiburtina, the last stop before Termini.
The underside of a bridge coasts past, lacquered with graffiti. Graffiti wraps every available surface of an uncoupled train car, even the windows. TYSON, says the back of a supermarket, and, Chiamate subito Rambo, which means “Call Rambo immediately.” I pick out Onion! and Piantatela (Stop it). For every legible scribble, a hundred are illegible, swirls and loops, drastic, hyper-stylized tags.
I think of home: Idaho in mid-June, the high meadows seething with flowers, sagebrush blooming, streams roaring. Even in the valley, in Boise, the heat won’t have set in yet, and the nights will be long and cool and unblemished.
But here, in this heat, everything feels sticky and worn, overvisited, overexamined. Everything feels as if it were written on. Monuments, windows, trash cans, awnings, and rocks. Ankles, backs, shoulders. You see it most obviously from the trains, as you leave behind the gorges and groves of the countryside and enter the apartment blocks and body shops, slipping beneath overpasses and tension wires, the horizon progressively shrinking. More people here, more paint. Nations of tourists padding through the streets. Stop Bush, Febo, TASMO. Magik, Els, DMG don’t touch.
An article the other day said Roman authorities spend €2.5 million (about $3 million) a year scrubbing 4.25 million square meters of graffiti off city walls. This cannot approach what private-property owners must spend. On a dozen different mornings I’ve seen sad-looking men taking water and steel wool and some dreadful solvent to the bricks of their restaurants. The street level of nearly every wall in the city center is paler than the rest, scrubbed and bleached and repainted a dozen times. Then tagged again: Panda7, Dumbo, Satan! Subway trains are sometimes so thoroughly covered they become montages of color: greens and reds and blues, conduits of paint bellowing through the labyrinth.
Kung has been busy in Trastevere. So has Uncle Festah. On via Nazionale, a single tow-zone sign sports maybe ten surfing stickers along with Fuck Cops, Rex, and Real Rock, all in English. A stenciled marijuana leaf has been applied maybe a hundred times along a block of via Cavour.
No Blood for Oil is rampant. So are No War and Nè USA, nè Islam! (Neither USA, nor Islam) and USA GO AWAY. Laura’s children come home from school and ask her if Yankee Go Home means what they think it means.
Hammers and sickles, swastikas, pentagrams, anarchy A’s. The wall above the doorbell of a government agency has been labeled Assassini. A window shutter nearby reads Tetti per tutti (Roofs for everyone).
Even the seemingly innocuous slogan is usually at least tangentially political: Me ne frego (I don’t give a damn) was the motto of Mussolini’s paramilitary groups, the Blackshirts. Carlo vive (Carlo lives) is a reference to Carlo Giuliani, a twenty-three-year-old demonstrator who was killed by police during the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa.
The pearls are often in mishandled English: Punk Rains; Einstein Rules Relatively OK?; and Always let you guides by love.
My favorite is near the Trevi Fountain: Viva Nixon.
T
hey’ve been doing it forever here. There is graffiti over two thousand years old in the ancient port city of Ostia. Lava preserved a bunch of it at Pompeii. In the Palatine Museum, there’s a first-century drawing of Christ on the cross with an ass’s head. Several meters below the altar at St. Peter’s, second-century pilgrims put their tags on what is believed to be Peter’s grave.
There was the medieval graffiti I saw inside Trajan’s column. Our friend Janna tells me that in 1528, a German invader scratched Why wouldn’t I laugh? The Lansquenets [German soldiers] have made the pope flee above a fresco in the Villa Farnesina down in Trastevere. Chapel singers signed their names into the lofts of the Sistine Chapel, and Napoléon’s soldiers got busy on the walls at Villa Madama. The legendary architect/etcher Piranesi scribbled Piranesi 1741 into a grotto at Hadrian’s Villa with a red crayon.
Who am I to judge? I’ve put my name here and there. We all mark our spaces somehow. The smell of aerosol, the satisfying sound of a ball bearing rattling in a tall can: in a city where private grinds ceaselessly against public, maybe paint helps define boundaries.
Even Umbria—which looks wild in places—is touched, and touched everywhere: the fraying spire of smoke from a farmer’s burn pile, the bright cliffs of quarries, the pine forest drifting past our train window that I realize, after a moment, is planted in rows.
Natives, exotics: even the umbrella pine, symbol of Rome, known to many as the Italian pine, may not be an indigenous plant—some believe that the Etruscans brought it from the Middle East. But should a botanist continue to call a tree exotic if it has been growing and dying here for over three thousand years?
When we get homesick, it is not so much for undubbed movies or Ziploc bags or turkey sandwiches as it is for landscapes, the beige hills and long-drawn skies of Idaho. In Boise no swirling convolutions of ancient cities hide beneath the streets, no empires lurk beneath the weeds. Just quiet houses, familiar faces.
Our train shunts through the maze of rails funneling into Termini. Rain hisses on the roof. A final quarter-mile of graffiti slinks past. Rex and SLIM and Up! Up! Shauna and I shoulder our bags and move down the aisle and hold hands as we climb back out into the city.
On the night of the summer solstice men walk up and down both banks of the Tiber, lighting 2,758 pan candles, one for every year since Rome’s founding. If I squint, I can look upriver from the Garibaldi bridge in Trastevere at two arcing smears of light, the reflections wrinkling and settling on the water, like those long-exposure photographs of skiers cruising down lightless slopes holding torches.
I walk the city in the darkness, sleepy but unable to sleep, circling the Palatine, first of Rome’s Seven Hills. The skeletons of ruined palaces are ghostly against the sky. A campanile hovers. Hidden in grassy mounds up there, the first cicadas practice their songs. A few weeks from now they’ll be roaring.
Up here, late at night, the city seems to exhale, one protracted outpouring of breath: a distant voice from a balcony, tailpipes, wind in the trees. Sighs, wingbeats, a meandering static. Maybe, maybe—although I haven’t heard one all year—a rooftop nightingale. Time devours everyone—Romulus, Pliny the Elder, John Keats, John Paul II—but tonight it feels as if some faint dispersal of them lingers, a tone, a shade, the vast accumulation of souls.
The city breathes out into the countryside and the breath diffuses and the silence out there tries to absorb it. Up on the Janiculum my little one-year-olds breathe in their beds, inhaling, exhaling.
From the locked gate at the Clivo di Venere Felice, with the Forum dark and quiet behind me, the wedge of the Colosseum I can see up ahead is webbed in spotlights, a vast and lonely specter, frozen in the glare, one streamer of ivy waving gently back and forth. Even now, after midnight, its tourists—small and fatigued—walk their laps.
Insomnia: I paddle toward sleep; sleep recedes beyond the horizon. It is as if thousands of tiny wires have been torn out of my neck. Italian tongue twisters corkscrew through my ears: Pelè partì parà per il Perù, però perì per il purè. Pelè left for Peru a paratrooper, but perished as puree. Pio Pietro Paolo Pula, pittore Palermitano, pinse pittura per poco prezzo. Pio Pietro Paolo Pula, painter from Palermo, paints a painting for a pittance.
I walk the boys to the vegetable stand on a Saturday morning, my brain a miasma: a pesca is peach, a pesce is a fish. Peaches, plural, are pesche. Pizza is pizza but a pezzo is a piece, a pozzo is a well, pezze are patches, and a pazzo is a nutcase. A puzza is a stench: Shauna sings, Puzza, puzza, to Henry while she changes his diaper.
When you’re overheated, worn out, and surrounded by Italians, the poetry that is their language can quickly slide toward gibberish. Buongiorno becomes wan journey; prices become nursery rhymes. One hundred and eighty-eight is centottantotto. Five hundred and fifty-five is cinque cento cinquanta cinque. A writer from a local magazine interviews me at the corner bar and I try to answer a couple questions in Italian but quickly stumble, lost in the maze after two steps. A fictional story, in Italian, is a racconto, which has a root in common with our English word account. But an account, as in a “record,” translates as narrazione. Storia is history. A novel is a romanzo and a historical novel is a romanzo storico. Romance, as a literary genre, is romanzo or racconto.
In the Dutch, French, and German editions of my last book, the word roman appears under the title: a novel. But in Italian, a romano, is, of course, a person from Rome. At least, I assume, novella, in Italian, has to mean “novella” in English, but it can also mean fiction in general, or, to make matters more confusing, a short story. It also means “new,” or “news.” Augh.
I try to tell the interviewer I have just finished a short story and am trying to resuscitate a half-drafted historical novel, but he ends up explaining the difference between a resoconto and a racconto.
Pelé, I tell him, left for Peru a paratrooper, but perished as puree.
Beneath the city that is the Italian language there are huge underground cities, Italo-Dalmatian, Tuscan, Latin, Greek, and beneath them catacombs of Oscan and Umbrian and Sabine, lightless tunnels opening to caverns, ghosts and bones, crypts opening to still deeper, fainter tunnels, the echoes of sentences in tribal languages that never had an alphabet in which to write them down. Slumbering tunnels of cuneiform, aquifers of hieroglyphics, razor-thin channels rising from Kurgan to Greek, Greek to Latin, Latin to Italian—the history of the world is compressed invisibly inside the words we say to each other, in whatever language—mother, madre, mater, mētēr—the sounds Henry and Owen are right now trying to fit their mouths around.
On the first of July, we wake to thunder. It cracks over the city twice, three times. The windows tremble in their frames. We stand in the terrace doorway and watch lightning split the darkness. After a minute or so, the spotlighted flank of the Vittoriano vanishes. A second later the rest of the city goes black. Our electricity goes, the clocks winking out, the fans spinning down. The trees across the street have plunged into shadow, as if a heavy carpet has unfurled over the city.
There’s a distant crackle, like static. Then a pause, an inhalation, the only sound a fading engine, the last running motor on earth, maybe, and the air above the street goes from black to white.
It rains so hard we cannot see past the terrace railing. Water catapults down the windows. Soon the wind is forcing water across the sills and Shauna is grabbing towels from the bathroom. The boys wake and bury their foreheads into our shoulders but don’t cry. “It’s only rain,” Shauna tells them. “Only rain.” For a few minutes we hold them in the kitchen. The building roars. Hail pounds the terrace.
As quickly as it came, it passes. The trees drip and the street steams, furrows of hail glimmering palely in the gutters, and the Vittoriano reemerges, glowing down in the city. We set our sons back in their cribs. The fans start back up. Shauna hangs the wet towels over the shower rod. A motorino cruises past in the street. In the gaps between clouds, stars burn.
A few days after the storm, we roll Henry an
d Owen to the Pantheon, and—for the first time in that big, crowded space—let them out of the stroller. They rattle the fencing around some renovation scaffolding, they wander in a forest of legs. Owen crouches at the divisions of colors in the marble floor—ivory gives to red, red gives to gray—and slaps his hands on the stone and plays his stomping game in the circles and squares, standing and looking at us and grinning and bouncing in his little sandals.
We chase after them. The love for your kids, I’m learning, is a kind of love that has no conclusion, a feeling that multiplies back on itself. It’s unquantifiable and almost certainly inexhaustible: No matter how many children you had, no matter what your children did, could you ever run out of that love?
If there is a God, His devotion to us is like that, like the way we feel about our children. And it feels as if something in the Pantheon expresses that, in the intersection of structure and sky, in the simultaneous expression of a building renewed and a building in ruin, the way the circle of light at the top lingers when everything else is in darkness.
Through the oculus, against a roiling backdrop of cloud, a single gull floats past, white and tiny, high above the city. I blink; in the intertwining heat and dust around me I see the heads of believers two thousand years gone, their faces turned up. Sons, daughters, mothers, fathers.