no amount of coffee enough to throttle the moist, ragged breath of sleep that shadows me. How long that shadow stretches, measured in men or minutes. The smell of mouldering bricks rouses me but into a dream state, and I keep closing my eyes to reconstruct the grandeur of the old republic out of the bones the church left behind. The ruined expanse is vast, scattered, the maw of an ancient hound, marble fragments like broken teeth scattered in corners. I wonder how much the Vatican saved in transportation costs with a ready cut stone quarry in the neighborhood. Am I the only one who has to fight to not leap around on the remaining structures? Or wondering how mich trouble I'd really fall into by hopping fences into the catacombs and temples that deny me. Too many fences, a concentration camp for malformed decrepit monuments. We spend almost as much time in termini station buying our tickets to Venice as we do on the palantine.
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