Katy

As usual, I'd forgotten. It was December first, and the chapel where St. Catherine of Siena had died so many centuries ago, was to be open late that afternoon. Possibly the only shot I would ever get at seeing it, and even worse, it was just around the corner from my place in Via Monterone. Meanwhile, studio was disintegrating into a zoo as final project due dates loomed and groups started to squabble.

I probably should have stuck fast to my desk. But I excused myself and ducked down the stairs into the cool darkness of the early Roman evening, jogging down the uneven cobbled streets and trying desperately to remember where I had seen that enormous plaque marking the site of the Transito di Santa Caterina. It was on the side of an apartment block with flaking orange stucco. Near a big door. An enormous door. Possibly.

This wasn't helping. I had to get there in time.

I turned a corner, realized I was stuck at the back of the Pantheon, and then doubled back, trying to remember what esoteric combination of turns had brought me there before. I was lost, tired and panting from the run, and I was still virtually in my back yard. It was hopeless.

Then suddenly, I was down the right slanting lane, and found myself in the Piazza Santa Chiara. Wait--was it the hotel, the Albergo Santa Chiara? Had the site of St. Catherine's deathbed gotten dedicated to another nun, and a Franciscan to boot?

No. Couldn't be. Maybe. This was Rome, after all. But still, there was another door, and I glimpsed light within, bright and white and almost clinical. A faded fresco of the Annunciation stood above it, blurred by the purple night.

I was even more disoriented when I stepped in. Inside, there was a big arc of lit letters over the door, Teatro something-or-other. I seemed to have wandered into a theater. And an ugly one at that, with a surprisingly plain, blank and weirdly characterless lobby. All it needed was a Go Tigers banner and the cast of Saved by the Bell to look like the inside of an American high school principal's antechamber. It was truly bizarre.

I stammered out "Transito?" and got a blank stare from the docent. Then, still utterly bewildered, I tried again. "Santa Caterina?" Ah, now we're talking. He made some vague gesture to the left, or possibly the right, and I moved forward. There seemed to be an equally bland auditorium off to the left, filled with nuns. If this was the chapel, someone probably should have gotten excommunicated.

But it wasn't. I went up some steps into a low-ceiling'd hallway ornamented with a fragment of stucco cherubs floating incongruously among the white concrete vaults. And there it was, doors open, lights lit, looking like a glorious baroque broom closet.

I was alone, but the rumble of voices from the lobby buzzed distractingly in my ears. It was hopeless. I wasn't going to get a quiet moment this way, not in a million years.

Still, it was an elegant little chapel, faced with marble and ornate roccoco bronzework. I pushed aside the little flower arrangement below the altar and looked down to see the reliquary inside, holding the skull and armbone of some obscure saint designated in Latin as John the Martyr. A few equally forgotten relics were placed behind plaques on either side. Two prie-dieux had been set up, and there were a handful of plastic bucket chairs in rows incongruously standing on the marble floor.

Most of the paintings were surprisingly amateur, showing gentle St. Catherine as weirdly, almost hideously pasty and puffy-faced, in bold contrast to the inlaid understatement of the chapel's architecture. One showed her literally exchanging her heart with Christ, less mystical than grisly. Still up on her image on the altarpiece, there was something to her eyes, upturned serene sky-blue almonds, that seemed to make it all worth it.

I sat there for a while, fumbling with my rosary, and found myself beginning to smile. Calm spread over me. And I realized, eventually, it was time to go and get back to work. All would be well.

But before I got up to go, a curious thing happened. As I said one last goodbye, I realized I'd called her, not St. Catherine, but simply Katy.