-IV-
Rome is both, or Rome is neither. Or Rome is everything at once. Rome is paganism and Christianity, faith and formula, the lasagna motif once again. Later in the day, we see this through another filter, at the Basilica San Clemente, not far from the Colosseum, where we stop to gawk and take some photos before the press of tourists, their living flesh, begins to overwhelm. On the way there, we pass the Circus Maximus again, race for the cure now finished, and beyond it the Forum and Travertine Palace. Then, the sprawling Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, another structure built on a foundation of armied antiquity. As we progress, a larger piece of the map fills in and I can see how all this fits together.
Another week and I would know this whole corner, this center of the city, from our hotel to the Via Veneto and the ossuary, to Piazza Colona to the Colosseum and over to the Jewish Ghetto, which backs onto the Forum, and across the Tiber to Trastevere and the Vatican. But in a week, I’ll be preparing for our flight back, returning from Sorrento to Rome FCO, from which we will depart the following day. The problem with travel, I am coming to realize, is that the multiverse, your particular microslice of it, is always snapping back into place.
Take this afternoon at the Basilica. We walk up from the Colosseum—up? I’m unsure of the direction, can’t get oriented as to east, west, north, south—and arrive at 12:15, only to be told it is closing at 12:30 and won’t reopen until two. To fill the time, we take an outdoor table at a taverna, sandwiched between an older couple and a young one with a toddler. All of us, it turns out, are North American—the olds from Toronto, here for a wedding; the family from Denver, where the husband is an anchor on the local news. He laughs when I make a comment about the troubles facing journalism, but mostly they keep to themselves.
The older couple, though—they are voluble. Pretty soon, it is as if we have come to lunch with them. They order fried artichoke hearts and insist we share; we offer stories about our children and our work. At one point, the wife, who I like—I like them both, actually, but her more—asks if she can broach a tricky subject. When I say yes, she asks, What is happening in the U.S.? It is like a hammer crashing through a wall of ice. All at once, we are talking about politics, our theories, the friends we have lost because they’ve fallen down one rabbit hole or another. The details are unimportant, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the details are both specific and the same. She laughs and touches my arm as if we are friends.
This, I suppose, is another benefit of travel; I would never do this at home. I would be too preoccupied or too suspicious, my distance manifests in many forms. Here, there is a kind of instant intimacy, perhaps because of the commonality of language. I’m reminded of the woman we met on Saturday in a café near our hotel, drawn to us because Rae spoke Italian; here it is the other way, although the wife and husband are fluent also, he because it is his heritage, and she because she was, in part, raised in Rome. Another multiverse, one so small it closes in an hour and a half, after Rae and I return to the Basilica. When does an encounter become a relationship? When it is the only interaction you will ever have.
And the Basilica … the Basilica is a magnificent multiverse unto itself. Built in the twelfth century, it was layered over another, earlier Basilica erected in the fourth century, which was itself superimposed on a first century set of structures: a large commercial or industrial space and a Mithraeum used for worship by members of the cult of Mithras, a pagan god. The two buildings were separated by an alley, which, as they do, continues to exist fifty feet below the level of the street. All of this, along with the earlier Basilica, was excavated beginning in the 1850s.
I don’t want to pretend to any knowledge here, since it was only Saturday I learned this place existed. Saturday was also when I learned about the ossuary, recommended by our acquaintance during drinks. By now, our four days in this city are beginning to feel like their own lasagna, a Moebius strip of coincidence and chance, one moment, one site or conversation, leading to another, and then back away. Time, again, the depth of human time. These are not eons but eras, after all. I might be getting to know this corner of the city but I will never truly get to know this corner of the city, which becomes ever more apparent later in the afternoon at the Piazza Argentina, where we have walked to change dollars into euros, and to visit a cat sanctuary that exists within the ruins of four Roman temples there.
After Rae has played with some of the cats and I have gathered our euros, we set out for the hotel. I check the app to be sure of the direction, but this is more confirmation than intent. Throughout the day, I’ve been using it less and less, more confident that I have some sense at last of where I’m going, even if I don’t know exactly where I am. And so, we plunge ahead, along a narrow street that gradually widens, until we see the rounded back of another structure, brick or something like it, plugged into the gaps between a set of columns, which protrude like sticks in dough. Another one, I say to Rae. We laugh as we walk around. Then, the building reveals itself, the best preserved ancient colonnade in the city, and I recognize the Pantheon. Like the Vatican yesterday, it’s hiding in plain sight, ancient marvel in a contemporary cityscape. It is the final site I wanted to visit that we haven’t yet encountered, and to come across it now feels like an omen or a sign.
Still, what are omens? Still, sign for what? Rome fell. And then it fell again. And again. I’m not thinking about that as we return to our wayfaring but it is as much a part of the landscape as antiquity. Let’s go this way, I say, and we do, and then Rae says, There’s Margherita, referring to a pizzeria near our hotel. It must be a chain, I answer, until she notices that we have turned onto Via Scrofa, which is only a block or two from our hotel. One by one, the familiar landscapes fall into place: the barbiere, the farmacia, the café. All of it right here, and the Pantheon just a few blocks over, waiting for us to come across it, to be lost as a way of being found.
