A Last Dash of Christmas Chiaroscuro,
or, Enoch, Aggie, and Me

And so I found myself back in Rome yesterday, jetlagged, confused and blissfully happy. It was an unseasonably bright and balmy Sunday afternoon, an unexpected surprise after a month of brown-grey drizzle before I left. And so, as the car rolled through Rome’s suburban sprawl--which seems incapable of making up its mind whether to be quaint or hideous--I sat back and enjoyed the warm sun and the crisp purple shadows.

Remember the shadows, they come back later.

The flight over had been relatively uneventful, if perhaps slightly insomniac: for some reason I’d elected to watch Freaky Friday on the plane rather than succumbing to the charms of Morpheus (the mythological god, not Laurence Fishburne). Yes, hardly an art movie, but I stand by my decision; in fact, I’d go as far to say that Miss Lindsay Lohan might eventually turn out to be a fine actress, presuming she doesn’t go and do something stupid like getting famous.

There’d been a minor snafu at Charles de Gaulle, but the long layover had given me plenty of time to explore the place, parts of which resembles nothing so much than the washing machine section of Sears mated with one of the more objectionable sets out of Babylon 5. And of course re-acquainting myself with the institution of the European bathroom, this one like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was about as functional as HAL the killer computer, anyway, with no soap and two water faucets on one sink, one of which didn't work. I had, however, no time to sleep there, as I had no intention of missing another flight.

So, once in Rome, I felt tired but restless, and while I eventually plopped down for a two-hour nap before Mass, I found myself back over at Studio soon enough. The sun had set on a blue Roman evening in the interim. I considered a walk, but stepping out onto Via Monterone, I was confronted with all the charm and ambience of a coal sack: the streetlights were still unlit. I turned back and reconsidered, and re-re-considered. I was still listless, and one of my friends said the walk might do me good.

I still had plenty of time to kill, so I made out for Piazza Navona. The Christmas fair had vanished, but there was certainly enough activity. A mime coated in plaster stumbled to get ready in a side street. A guitarist played mellow classics on a bench beneath the fountains and I soon found myself passing stores and restaurants I’d forgotten about or never noticed. I stopped in the foyer of a toyshop and admired the model soldiers, moved on and considered the aptly-named Don Chiscotte gelateria next to the Spanish Cultural Center. And then I spotted a narrow slit of golden light: the open door of a church.

Piazza Navona has two churches facing onto it, the grand Borromini Sant’ Agnese, built on the site of the little virgin’s martyrdom in the Circus Agonalis, and the neglected early-Renaissance church of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, which is never open. Except it was open now.

I had at least an hour until mass at Sant’ Eustachio, so I decided I couldn’t miss an opportunity like this. The door was, much to my astonishment, a rear one that came out into a pleasant, unassuming ambulatory lined with lurid, dramatic baroque sculptures of Christ carrying the cross and the Virgin of Sorrows. Christ’s foot had been bronzed, smoothed by the caresses of centuries of pilgrims. And they seemed to still have their crèche up.

This brought two things to mind. First, all those frustrating hole-in-the-wall churches you can never find, and can never find when they’re open, well, Sunday night is the day to check them out. Occasionally, one runs the risk of interrupting evening mass, but this is hardly an obstacle to the devout--or, for that matter, stealthy--traveler. Second, and more excitingly, I remembered Christmas wasn’t officially over according to the ecclesiastical calendar. These days, Baptism of the Lord is the cap of the season, not Epiphany. The glorious constellation of lights and wreathes I’d seen just starting to bedeck Rome the week I left might just still be up.

Bearing this in mind, I started to wander with a purpose, but not before I’d stepped across the piazza to visit Sant’ Agnese, and found it even more splendid than I remembered. The façade loses much of its charm encased in hulking scaffolding and darkness, but the interior was the same. The troublesome piped-in music was still there, but I noted, much to my satisfaction that the ad orientem high altar was still in use--candles blazing, with a brass missal stand at the center and a delicate silver chalice to one side. It didn’t look like it was quite time for mass yet, so I loitered reverently, considering the bone-white marble statues of St. Agnes and St. Sebastian against their bold green marble false-perspective altar-pieces.

St. Agnes. Stony flames whirled around her baroquely-draped ankles, arms raised with histrionic drama to the heavens, and she looked rather nubile for a twelve-year-old. Still, it was with a certain sadness that I noticed that none of the post-cards for sale really captured the image’s wonderful primadonna tragedienne-cum-Teresa of Avila grandeur.

I took another turn around the church, and discovered that I wasn’t done with Agnes yet. Or at least, with a certain part of her anatomy. (Don’t worry: you’re thinking of Agatha). In a little, unassuming side-chapel, I found an elaborate reliquary, draped with enameled wreaths and topped with an image of the little martyr--but what did it hold? I noticed a little glass window at the base--out of which stared the dark eyesockets of a tiny little skull. The young saint’s.

Tiny, tiny, tiny, so delicate. It wasn’t just pious embroidery--she had to have been twelve, this sweet little martyred creature. Darn. My late-night aerial movie showing might have proved that talent isn’t wasted on the young (not all the time, at least), but neither, it seems, is holiness. Here she was, nine years my junior---if she was alive, she’d be the irritating younger sister of some close friend and I should be calling her Aggie rather than going down on my knees and addressing her as a spotless virgin martyr, God’s own little lamb.

Hey, Aggie, what’ja do in school today? Oh, prayed a few souls out of purgatory, healed a tumor or two, you know, the usual stuff. And what’ve you done lately, Matt?

Well, food for thought, anyway.

***

I soon found myself strolling through the back-alleys of the Campus Maritius, passing by Santa Maria dell’ Anima’s serene, if undistinguished, Renaissance facade. The Hotel Raphael’s facade next door was a grand festival of Christmas lights interwoven among cascading ivy. The organist was starting a prelude when I poked my head in. Santa Maria della Pace, another of the strangely numerous French churches in Rome, was closed, but the chic little restaurant out in the piazza was just heating up.

And so I wandered, enjoying the darkness and the last few sparks of Christmas cheer spread around the city. Italy might have ignored her Mother Church on just about every issue in the last twenty-odd years, but at least one of the more enjoyable aspects of the calendar reform of 1969 had made it onto the streets. Campo dei Fiori was crackling as lovers took pictures of one another with portable phones and a little Christmas market crackled at the far end of the square, peddling jams and honeys and some hokey new-agey medical texts. Lights were strung across the Via de Baullari under a grand sign proclaiming Auguri, a generic Best Wishes from one of the more pagan parts of the city.

They say that Campo dei Fiori is the Greenwich Village of Rome, though I wouldn’t know: the posters are all in Italian and might be advertisements for a John Birch Society meeting or Biracial Lesbians in Concert for all I know. It seems a nice enough place, and it’s even got its own elementary school, though I will admit that’s located down the street from a fashion poster of a semi-nude woman and a man locked in some sort of complicated Tai Chi position. Or something on those lines.

Meanwhile, back in Christian Rome, Santa Brigitta in deserted Piazza Farnese had a little garland of lights and pine around its Baroque doorframe, while the perpetually-closed Church of Santa Maria dell’ Orazione e Morte sported a huge sign imploring all to come see their presepio, their Christmas crib.

And with good reason too, as tomorrow the liturgical clock would be re-set and we’d be back in the green of Ordinary Time. The lights would vanish, the Three Kings would turn back to Saba and the Isles, and the heavens would close on God the Father’s revelation of His beloved Son.

This particular Santa Maria is one of the odder churches in the city. The name works out to meaning something like Our Lady of Prayer and Death, and at at one time it belonged to Rome’s undertakers. The façade is baroquely sinister enough, full of winged hourglasses, clustering bulky Corinthian columns and grinning skulls. The ones on either side of the great central portal I’ve decided to name Bob and Filbert, incidentally. If you can stomach the morbid weirdness, it’s quite a splendid composition, and even more so in the washing light of evening.

Stumbling around Rome at night is actually a fine hobby. Every city’s night is different; Rome’s is a grandiose maze of golden-orange floodlight and purple sky, backlit fluorescence catching the hazy silhouettes of bicycles and motorini against stucco walls. And Rome is at her best then because Rome is baroque.

While it is probably a matter of pragmatism, there’s nonetheless a good enough reason that all these little jewel-box churches are open so late into the evening. Architecture, they say, is the art of casting perfect shadows, and the Baroque clutched that dictum to her wild and stormy heart as she inspired Bernini and Borromini to go about their daily business. Baroque’s in the business of grand contrasts, and it doesn’t get much more primal than light and darkness.

The various books of Enoch are among the weirder books of the Old Testament apocrypha, and I wouldn’t suggest they make a very useful guidebook to the celestial world. Still, I wonder if perhaps the old fellow (whether he was really Enoch or not) was on to something, at least some of the time. He describes heaven’s highest level as full of darkness and torch-flame, a strangely evocative prophesy of some many firelit churches of the last fifteen hundred years. Black night and hellfire are devilish, but God has been called the darkening Cloud of Unknowing, and the fire of the Holy Ghost has consumed so many saints.

There’s something over-pure about electricity that bothers me. Lightbulbs seem Gnostic, disembodied--too clean and tepid for a God Who became Man. Christ is the sun of justice, hotter than a million nuclear explosions, not a docetic Mickey Mouse you plug into the wall to keep the baby from hollering. Electric light would destroy this glorious, sensuous, pious chiaroscuro, cheapen the dazzling gold, turn so many spectacular evocations of heaven into Cosa Nostra Rococo.

Or, for that matter, turn Agnes from divine to merely diva.

It’s impossible to banish Edison’s specter from the basilicas of Rome--after all, San Paolo fuori le Muore disappeared as a result of an unfortunate fire, and the notion of a church lit only by candlelight would drive even Rome’s presumably lenient fire-code investigators insane. Also, as so many smoke-blackened ceilings and altarpieces testify, there’s a certain point when divine darkness just becomes soot.

But the Romans have enough sense--they still have kept the memory of wax tapers and blazing altars alive, and held back on the urge to blast so many cherubim with Hollywood Klieg lights. The delicate, subtle electric light that illumes Rome’s churches amid her balmy evenings is as close to the original ambience that the saintly Bernini and the tormented Borromini had striven to create in those theaters of light and darkness, the churches of Rome.

I came back, just in time for Mass. And I have to agree, the walk had definitely done me good.