allan

The sun broke from over the Vatican walls as though guided by a masons plumb line, a razor of light opaque enough to steer the focus of my lense. Natural artifice, smog, or the sheer gravity of gods greatest edifice, never have I seen sun so visual. When it falls without impediment, it drowns the roman spaces in a luminous sheet that works against the dimension of the city, flattening it’s hills and domes. I don’t need to throw money into the trevi fountain to return here, because the Sistine chapel is inexplicably closed today, and as tomorrow is sunday and our final one here in Rome, I will have missed the biggest tourist attraction in Italy. Oops. The pantheon is next, a thorougly stunning cylindrical occulus in the best state of repair in all Rome, because of course, it was converted to a church thereby preserving the stone in the wake of the churches many building projects throughout history. The niches are occupied with holy figures of course, and the sense of them not belonging is palpable. I see in my minds eye, towering phidian apollos and Dioscuri. And greeted by diminutive, languid apostles, even painting pushed into the naves, beneath the smaller arches for lesser godlings, now empty above catholic requilaries like the gouged sockets of an unrepentant Anglican. Is that a mcdonalds I see before me? I drown my desire to behold striding pagan deities in a big mac. A long meandering walk in the neighborhood later in the evening increases my girth some by further adventures in pizza. My stomach is beginning to look distinctly..fertilized. I hope I remain spry enough to dodge the copious coils of dog shit, lying like landmines beneath the umber leaves.

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.

makes for very pretty soup.

5am awake, fuck! I’ll go outside and witness the sun rise, glorious and respl..no, it’s pouring out. First shift of the day is chicken detail, releasing the wily beasts and capturing their unfertilized offspring, narrowly avoiding the cunningly laid offal traps these feathered crap machines produce in such abundance. After the cleaning chores, we wander off to explore Calvi, a beautiful hilltop medieval town 45 minutes down the road. Arrive there during siesta, thread our way through narrow overtly cobblestoned avenues and marvel at the sheer lack of humans. The rain drives us back home at a trot. Brittney the volunteer coordinator crouches in the lee of the laundry, girded with work detail that ought to keep us occupied till our apotheosis.

I wake at 5 am thanks to the fucking nap, and linger in bed for 2 hours before breakfast. This time I secure myself some goddamn dinner rolls moments before the germans clear them out. There is only hot cappuccino milk foam for the cereal. We retrieve our tickets to calvi, and search for smoothies in vain, before embarking on our journey to the countryside. Once you get 15 minutes out of Rome, the grafitti diminishes down lusty green and meadowy vistas. The farmhouse we are staying in for the next 3 weeks adjacent to the monastery, is out of a dream, astride a hilltop overlooking olive groves and figs. And table tennis. I lean out our window taking pictures before being pulled away for lunch. The nap is 3 hours this time but I’m up in time for dinner of homemade chicken soup, regaled by burning man stories by our hosts Betsy and christopher, before wine and steak. The heat is broken, so we take ourselves to bed thankful for a being to nestle against, because it’s fucking cold in here.

I wake at 7am and push myself past the long sense memories of gorgeous sex, of someone banging on the wall, of less than good pizza eaten in bed, an interlude. The breakfast room is crowded with a choirfull of German tourists, who appear to have scarfed all the bread. We tumble easily towards the Vatican, passing the colloseum and trevi fountain, both on our left hand side (for once) and stop for ice cream beside the pantheon. Finally onward to the sistene chapel, which is monumentally more impressive than expected, the characters exude from the ceiling, escape artists one musical key away from pouring onto the crowd below. I would love some drugs.  A particularly insidious fart as we exit, which echoes like an angels trumpet. The museum has so many busts, it looks more like a shop display, and 3 of the amazingly intact full body statues actually still have their bronze weapons in hand, something I’ve not witnessed in any other museum; it’s like the Vatican handed out to other institutions all the crumbly tat they couldn’t find a hall for. We return to nap, and 4 hours later emerge for a lovely dinner in a taverna with a British flag outside. The lasagna was heavenly and bilingual.