As I write this I am sitting on the steps of Santa Croce, an enormous
church here in Florence. Above me rises a statue of Dante, and to my
left American tourists deliberate how they will spend the rest of their
afternoon. The apartment I am living in is some 50 feet from where I
type. This is a kind of old world paradise.

I was in Rome when the Pope died. We had spent our first afternoon
there exploring the Collosseum and the Forum. I’m not even sure how to
begin to describe it. Old, very old, you just get this sense that
Sacramento, that the US, has not even begun to exist.

(This is hard to write about, sitting out here in the sun, in this
piazza, tourists flocking, an old man on a bicycle rides passed with an
ornate wooden frame, maybe 4 feet high, meant for a painting, slung
over his shoulder. Before I came to Florence I hadn’t felt the sun in
months.)

And then the Pope began to die. We were in an Irish Pub. It was late,
maybe around midnight. And the reporters on all the news channels were
stationed outside the Vatican. They said he was going to die. Thousands
of people were holding a vigil in Piazza di Santa Pietro. We left the
bar, went to the bus station, and found the right bus. Then we were
there too.

People were singing. People were crying. People sat on the ground in
front of burning candles. We met other young Americans, kids studying
in Rome. They were there for the same reason that we were, because the
event, the fact that the pope was dying, the pope who had been pope our
entire lives would soon die, not that any of us were necessarily
Catholic or religious, we just somehow dimly understood how significant
this was, how historical, how strange the confluence of events were
that put us in Rome when the pope was going to die, how strange it was
that though we were at a vigil, that we were surrounded by people
already mourning, we were also surrounded by tourists who continued to
be tourists though the pope was soon to die beyond a window that surely
caught the flashes of their cameras as they posed smiling in front of
the obelisks or in big happy hugging groups so that some day they could
look back and say, “see, I was there, I was there when the pope died,
isn’t that cool?” because “cool” was the word I kept hearing, cool and
strange, isn’t this cool and strange that the pope is going to die in
that window right up there, and I am standing here, in the cold at 2:30
in the morning with thousands of others waiting for the Pope to die so
that I can be there and say that I was there. At 2:30 my friends
dragged me away because I was too cold to stay and sleep. In the
morning I arose earlier then my friends and returned. I read in a guide
book that Piazza di Santa Pietro can hold 300,000 people easily and if
that is so there must have now been almost 100,000 many vigilers many
tourists, more tourists now, unaware that the pope was going to die,
smiling and snapping those pictures as the nuns and priests knelt in
prayer, as people sang together mournful songs, the tourists kept
snapping those pictures in front of the fountains and in front of St
Peter’s Basilica and I sat against a pillar and took it all in.

Then I stood in line and entered St. Peter’s Basilica. The eyes try to
take it all in, every detail, and the mind quails, the imagination is
pounded flat by this awesome space. It is beyond me to write about it
sitting here in the sun. I wandered around somewhat devastated by the
knowledge that I could not take it all in, that essentially it was far
greater than my comprehension, the space quashed me into a daze, the
currents of people moving me through the space, this incredible
enormous space. I made sure to see Michaelangelo’s Pieta, which is now
behind glass because some time a go a man enraged at it’s stunning
beauty smashed off Mary’s nose with a hammer before he was wrestled
down and banished to prison forever. The nose is perfectly
reconstructed and Christ lay’s limp in Mary’s lap, marble somehow
turned into flesh, marble somehow turned into two people one alive and
one recently made a god, somehow, confounding the natural order of
things, life did not come from life but from stone. I left and stood in
line for the cupola. The line was quite long. I decided not to take the
elevator. I climbed quickly. And then I was on the inside rim of
Michalangelo’s dome, 250 high, looking down upon the people skittering
around the floor of the Basilica, everything enormous, the dome
launching and arcing above, vertigo gripping at my groin, face pressed
to the grate, fighting the fear of being so high and fighting the awe
crashing over me, dazed finding the stairs up, cramped an winding,
single file plodding up up up with all the other sight see-ers, and
then on top of Rome seeing the city spread out before me, the Piazza
below with all the vigilers and mourners and revelers and carnival
seekers swarming, the pope in his bed behind that window or maybe that
window, the rolling broccoli green hills of a country that reminds me
so strongly of Napa, of my California, but far more ancient in the
experiences of human culture, and against I had to fight the shooting
vertigo, the people pressing into each other and into the flimsy
railing and just the thought of slipping over the edge, down the slope
of the dome almost paralyzing. Eventually back to earth, back to the
vigil holding for some gelato and a sandwhich, to be a witness at the
popes death, the crowds growing into the evening, people surging and
chanting and crying and still snapping pictures and smiling.
Then to reconvene with my friends and a mad chase all over Rome for the
best pizza in Rome and the pope died while we were in the cab, lost,
looking for the best pizza in rome. The pope died at 10:37 and we were
eating by 11:15 and done by midnight and then a stroll through a part
of town with no tourists but all young celebratory Italians seeming to
care very little that the Pope was finally dead, and then along the
tiber, the traffic long lines of cars sludging forward everyone
scrambling to get to the Vatican as the last breath of the Pope still
wafting through the Piazza, and then I was there and my friends and
gone to watching the basketball which was starting around 2 am and I
was in the Piazza and people were singing and not too many cameras
flashing and the general sense was hard to tell except that maybe there
was a sort of release and an understanding that a great man had just
died and we were all witnesses.
I awoke early the next morning and Clark and I again returned for the
Mass, and maybe over 100,000 people were there, maybe over 200,000,
very quiet as Mass took place, a series speakers, giant screens erected
so that all could see, the ritual and ceremony of death, the death of a
pope, Clark and I standing toward the back, uncomprehending, everything
beyond us but the importance and enormity, and then it was over and we
streamed out with the hordes and went to the train staion and slept all
the way back to Florence.

I am not sure what is next for me. I ran through the hills outside of
the old city of Florence yesterday. I could see everything. Everything
is old and beautiful. It is clean. It is warm. Still I am not sure
what’s next.

happiness and virtue
ck


4-08-05
On the steps again. It’s nighttime, the streets are wet with the days
rain and they sort of shine up at you from the crevices and pits in the
paving stones with reflected light glaring from crowded bars and
sweet-tooth fantasy gelato parlors and the swarming cars busses mopeds
all splashing along on this cold wonderful Saturday night. I have been
eating like a robber baron the last few days, indulging in highly
recommended restaurants serving courses a bit over the budget, but
culinarily priceless. Last night, after the arrival of my friend Mike
Sacks, fresh from a fat pay check at a boarding school in London, we
made our way to Cibreo Trattoria, the less expensive annex of Cibreo, a
4-star Florentine restaurant some are reported as describing as the
best restaurant in all of Italy. Now the Cibreo annex sloping at a
steep discount still runs around 20 euros for two courses, but what
rich and subtle flavors the tongue has the absolute pleasure to
negotiate! I dug into a vegetable stew that more than made up in taste
for what it lacked in presentation. Mike polished off a fish soup that
could only be described as divine. The bread we asked for to sop up the
last morsels was certainly the only disappointment of the evening,
reminding the taste buds of wheat and stone. The next course was a sort
of Tuna soup for me, and dried cod and mayonnaise for Mike. In my
attempt to write about this food, I am running out of descriptive terms
so I will resort to the involuntary noises that one might have heard
had he or she been sitting close by during the feast: mmmmmmmm,
mmmmhhhhmmmm, ahhhhhhhh, (sigh) all sort of in a quiet contentment, a
quiet awe. Now I must tell you, these portions were exceedingly small,
but after a day of gorging on serving after serving of Gelato, the
richness of these miniature dishes was more than enough to satiate my
usually ravenous hunger.

Today, what did I do today, woke up late as I am wont to do, the luxury
of a long hotel shower (Mike asked me to stay with him so I could be
his guide for the city, and the zoo really couldn’t hold me after the
addition of one Adam Zettel) walked to the Duomo, climbed the steps,
all 400 plus of them, winding round and round and ever up, the stone
walls tattooed with the scrawl of would be immortals – Arnold and Mayya
4ever, a huge heart around Dave and Kim, calligraphy names, me thinking
it would be funny to take a huge sharpie and write MICHAELANGELO WUZ
HERE!!! APRIL 9th\1499!!! – up and up turning and pinching into the
walls to skirt passed those ascending racing past the sweating and
labored breath of the less in shape, up through the interior of the
dome covered in sadistic frescoes depicting in almost giddy detail the
tortures of hell while the benign and sinless watching absently and
with the slight trace of compassion from above, the dome coming
together and still more steps until we are outside and again I am
subdued by the view, a 360 degree look at Florence at Tuscany there
where I have lived there we have sat in the sun what is that over there
the synagogue the infinite stretch of the rails extending from the
train station near our hotel green hills pressing into the gray bellies
of the fat slow moving rain clouds a fire in the crook of the hills
sending up its white thread the gems of courtyards dotting the burnt
peach city the Arno the Uffizi the Santa Maria Novella all there and
maybe I really am on top of the world. There is more, the Ghiberti
bronze doors of the baptistery that Michalangelo called the gates of
paradise, the 6 more euros for the Duomo museum, with the real panels
from the doors, sculptures by Donatello, by Giotto, by so many others
all with those over-syllabled Italian names, architectural drawings,
original winches and wooden beams, retrieved frescos and even
explanations in my native tongue English, one of the best museums I’ve
explored so far, overlooked and un-crowded, well lit and educational,
with the sort of layout that makes moving from exhibit to exhibit fluid
and seamless and then out again to the wet streets approaching that
point where there has been an overload, a sort of detail fatigue, a
Jesus and Mary and 500 year old statue fatigue that sort of smearing
together of everything all those sing song roller coaster names and
ancient dates and bitter restorations and various floods famines and
wars that brought these relics to us in these particular conditions
which I can’t now discern because it really has all become strewn
together in this beautiful old mess and then even more even more with
another church with more faded frescos and somewhere in these halls the
cubby that Savaronola once called home the church leader who in all his
pious wisdom ordered the burning of all the books and paintings and
works of art that could feed the fire who just a few years later would
be brought by an angry mob to feed the fire with his own flesh and
somewhere around here amongst these sober old frescos he once lived and
once again out onto the streets of this fine and bustling city no no I
don’t want to buy a strip of paper with my name written in stylized
fonts no I don’t want a bag or a cheap poster of the birth of venus
because I am quite content with my own memory of the real thing (I went
to the Uffizzi the other day and roamed the Rennaissance halls for two
hours after standing in line for two and a half sort of like the
chairlifts relationship to skiing but gosh darnit it was worth it to
sit in a room full of Bottacelli’s to see Michaelangelo’s only
completed canvas to see the Raphael’s and even the Goya’s and Ruben’s
at the end because that’s why you travel to see such things in the
naked flesh) and no I will not give the able bodied 22 year old beggar
any money because look at all these immigrants who are at least trying
to work so kick you habit kid and don’t expect anything from me and
then back to the hotel for a nap.

Nap over. Time to eat. Consult guide book. Follow map. 5 minute wait.
Usually good sign. Order sample plate of meets and cheeses to split.
Order Pici and with Red Sauce and Boar. Order lemon chicken. Eat.
Drool. Sigh. High five. We eat well. We, the Princes of Florence. Not
even room for another helping of gelato.

So what now you ask. Tomorrow we go to Cinque Terra, five towns carved
out of the Mediterranean cliffs where no cars are allowed. Wednesday I
board a plane to Madrid where Magdalena in her infinite Spanish wisdom
will guide me through the festivals in Seville. Then who knows what
from where from whom at that point. I think it will be time to
transform myself into a train gnome, with an odyssey through Spain and
France to Amsterdam where I will reconvene with Nate, fresh from his
slaughter of the MCAT, and Adam, who is certain to have drunk thrice
his weight in beer from now till then. I live, above all else, a
blessed and extremely fortunate life. And who knows, if everything
unfurls as I hope it will, May will find me in Thailand. Yeah, I don’t
really think anyone saw that coming.

happiness and virtue
ck