A Nocturn for Sant' Andrea della Valle

There are times when I wonder if I have stayed too long in Rome. It is almost sinful to grow used to living in such a dense web of interlocking histories. Every day and every night I stump past the vast pockmarked travertine front of Sant' Andrea della Valle, the cavernous, dark mother church of the Theatine order, and every day I hardly look up from the basalt-black cobblestones.

The sampietrini, as they're known, are quite wonderful themselves, glossy and wet in the rain. On Via Monterone, narrow and uneven, they throw up dissipated reflections of the garish green plastic sheeting that now covers the facade of our studio building as they restore our grimy stucco with the usual Italian surfeit of noise.

But I hardly notice them either, my mind is on bedtime instead. It sounds odd to hear from someone who pours forth such literary extravagances on a weekly basis, but I don't daydream much anymore. Imagination is like a valve that goes on and off for me, and as I recover from the grey rain and sepia skies of a Roman winter, my mind is still caught up in prosaic and quotidian questioning.

It's hard to notice, really, it's so easy to grow neglectful of wonder. Old cities are so full of stories swirling around them, eons of wars and noise and silence it's sometimes simpler to shut them out and pull back into your own story, such as it is. Sometimes it takes getting out of yourself, imagining yourself as if this were your first day in the city, free of all responsibilities, to bring back this joy.

And it hits you suddenly and marvelously. One night, alone at dinner with a book, I found myself at a second-story window looking down at the darkened Corso Vittorio full of bright headlights and realized this was the sort of idyll I'd longed for all my life. Alone in a big city full of wonder, free to see anything and meet anyone, settling down to a neat little dinner after a long and satisfying day.

So, a few days later, coming out of studio one cool purple evening, I decided to turn on my imagination again for that short, uninteresting trip across traffic-choked Piazza della Valle. I passed one of my fellow students in the alley of the Redentoristi, the bright fluorescent tubes fixed to the metal scaffolding backlighting his head, his face all but invisible save for the red sparking end of his cigarette. I muttered a hello and moved onward. I'd seen him day in and day out, but what an image, this conjunction of fire, electricity and darkness!

Maybe that was a lucky break, but I filed away that memory in my head should I ever write a novel about Rome. Then, for a few moments, it seemed forced as I tried to consider the millions of feet, from ancient Romans to modern Romans, that had tramped my same path, the coinicidences of twenty centuries that had brought the buildings and blocks to lie just so on the map. It was forced.

But then I saw Sant' Andrea, really saw it for the first time in many months. It's easy to grow complacent in Rome about church architecture; a basilica that would be the outrageous ornament of any American metropolis sometimes seems just like an inferior copy of Sant' Ignazio or a superior--but incidental--variation on the Gesu. Volutes and pilasters blur together into a single ideal church, which then blurs into oblivion in the lumber-room of the architect's head.

I saw it, and I realized it was orange and violet, not white travertine. Or so the Roman night had painted it. The orange light of Rome's streetlamps has a peculiar way of settling on the eyeball; their aureole becomes almost visible, a real and tangible ring of light threaded with rays that glimmer as you blink in disbelief. The fiery Mandarin yellow of so many of these garish streetlamps had bloomed vividly, delicately on the old stone. St. Sebastian's agony had grown ever more vivid as he writhed in his aedicule, his muscles outlined in sharp purple shadows. Above, far above, angels flew with billowing wings on either side of a great ecclesiastical coat-of-arms suspended weightlessly in the pediment. Lit from beneath by electricity, they had a comforting theatrical turn to them, as if they were about to transform into trumpet-blowing muses. City as theater, church as theater, God as director.

I sometimes wonder if I have been too hard on Rome, perpetually questioning the value of so many apartments like a communal hive. Love your enemy and love your neighbor, perhaps because they're often the same person, and when you share a thin party wall with them, it becomes an even greater struggle for charity. But the truth is, so many of Rome's old palazzi, now turned into gracious plebeian housing, are not hives: Italy's indefatiguable and unconscious individualism comes through in the end. Laundry spills down from light-well windows while roof-terraces bloom with vast verdant thickets of palms and ivy.

Now that the skies are blue and cloudless, a pure and bright and unadulterated a blue straight out of a paint tube, everything is returning back to life. Blue skies. I saw some this morning, and wondered if there had been a mistake.

I remain agnostic about city life: after so many years of dogmatically depreciating the American ideal of the little house on a great green hill, it seems only fair to give it a fair chance now that I have seen how the other half lives here in Rome. Nonetheless, there is a particular stretch of crooked lane that runs north of the Gesu, in the shadow of an old papal palace festooned with roccoco pilasters and heraldic eight-pointed stars, that I find myself returning to again and again. It is blissfully quiet during the day. There are no shops or motorini to break the silence, though if you step into the next street the hurlyburly of Rome remains conveniently close at hand.

I look up at the names on the apartment buzzers or the single green door of a rowhouse whose dried vines will soon burst into a great robe of glossy-leafed ivy and I think, I could be happy here, with my own door, with my own climbing greenery, maybe with my own roof-terrace with its illegal pergolas. Maybe I could.

I should amputate that word, maybe. Last night, I walked to my room across the narrow balcony that spans the courtyard of our little hotel, and looked up. A golden spotlight gleamed on a latticework of green branches interlacing with a trellis on the terrace of the building next door, three stories overhead. Like a most perfect work of art in a gallery, green and gold against the night sky. Only a few steps from where I sleep. Wonderful. Wonder. I had rediscovered wonder. Of course I could be happy here. I already am.