Snow and Secrets

I caught up with Melanie, one of my classmates, on the Ponte Vittorio Emanuelle. The bridge's great verdigrissed bronze angels reared up against a bare grey sky.  For a few hours, the Eternal City had taken on the strange wintry beauty of Vienna or Prague, and the view down the curving enfilade of the Tiber's steep-walled banks seemed as coldly exotic as the frozen Neva.  White crystals flecked her black hair.  "It's snowing!" I cried.

She was excited.  Just like a bit of South Bend here in Rome, she said, perhaps only half-facetiously.  We dodged the traffic along the Corso Vittorio Emanuelle and traded stories of our morning's adventures.  We had just come back from a class visit to the vast sprawling corridors of the Vatican Museums, sketching and thinking and stumbling through centuries of history.  

We had studied the labyrinthine town-plans of the great Corridor of Geographical Maps, all gold-green and indigo streaked with gilt compass-lines.  The torturous antique coastlines bristled with miniaturized portraits of towns, some ideograms, some verging on the real, names familiar and obscure set beside them in antiquated black type.  From here, the rector of the world had surveyed his domain, from this little microcosm, now neatly shuttered off and heated internally.  Outside, the greenery of the Vatican gardens had seemed incongruous under the pale sky, like part of another world from the rich cosmography of the maps.

And then, I had been crossing over to the Sistine Chapel, moving past the vast canvas of Polish Jan Sobieski--a monarch from a cold country--raising the siege of Vienna, when I saw them. The first gentle flakes of snow arabesking against the dun-colored brick of the fortified sanctum.  The first hints of curiosity had begun.  A handful of touristing faces were pressed to the glass of the windows ringing the courtyard, Japanese, American, the differences inconsequential.  I descended to the basilica--down a stairway marked for tour groups only--and found myself out in the open air again, St. Peter's travertine cornice soaring overhead.  

A person shrieked in Spanish into a cellphone that it was indeed snowing.  Out in the square, I could see silver on the great Christmas tree that loomed over the vast Nativity scene, still standing so late in the season, and couldn't tell for sure if it was tinsel or snow.  I still hoped for a blanket of white, but saw only water gather on the ground.

On the Corso, the flakes whirled and eddied, their rhythms growing stronger and wilder with every passing step.  Umbrellas had gone up as if it were an average rainstorm, and people hunched over, wandering disinterestedly down the street.  It seemed like a gigantic secret, our joy at this exotic cold, a gigantic secret that we were keeping from the whole city.  

The snow continued to whisk wildly, melting the bright terra cottas and pinks of the stucco facades into pixillated dreams, like a blizzard in Lima or a sandstorm in London, a chimera out of magic realism.  But this was Rome, where magic was real, where the impossible can happen every day, and when, somehow, you sense that an out-of-place snowfall somehow means something more than just a divine whimsy. After all, an incongruous summer snowfall had outlined the foundations of St. Mary Major so many centuries ago.

But soon, I saw the flakelets in my friend's hair had turned to little drops of suspended melt. The snow was dissolving, and soon my jacket was streaked with rain and the sky full of falling water.  The umbrellas became real again, rather than ensigns of fantasy, and we parted ways within eyesight of the great, flat, familiar facade of Sant' Andrea della Valle.  Rome had become normal again, a rainy, wet, Italian city, the surreal snowfall melting once again into the wonderful rhythm of the prosaic.  We'd had our fun, shared our secret, and now it was time to go home.