There is nothing more spectacularly beautiful than a summer afternoon in Campo de’ Fiori, sipping cheap wine in the shadow of Giordano Bruno, a monk burned for believing what we believe. The walls here are made of fire, the seething sun etches warm colours into our skin, blinds us with tranquility. In Italy, love is a pure essence like the wine and olive oil, something people slather onto their skin to make it soft and bronzed. All those moments we’ve lived through up till now, that have only served to drive us to this one spectacular moment in time, live resolutely in the past – finely bound volumes in a great library that will eventually unravel and pass into the dustbin we call ‘loss’. There is no purpose, no higher good. We are simply dancing a fool’s dance ‘round the fire in which Bruno was burned at the stake. Bring me another glass of rosso.
But every once in a great while – perhaps just once or twice while awaiting our next glass at the Vineria – a force from the outer universe reaches in exactly when we least expect it and punches through the transparent bounds of this world into our very reality. We try to deny these funny little anomalies of existence, but they wrap around our dreams and strangle, daring us to look away like a tick burrowed into the skin. Any attempt to pretend we are still what we were a moment ago will be met with misery and frustration – this is force to be reckoned with; it will not be ignored and it has the power to destroy, but perhaps your life needed a little destruction. Drop your nets and become fishers of men – does this little kick in the chianti amount to the force of God? It takes us to the very edges of ourselves and obliterates everything we knew, pointing down a completely foreign path just as a dog’s master buries its nose in its shit. There is something out there, you can feel it.
In the end, faith doesn’t make you understand the world around you, only gives order to the complication. When the voices in my head call out and someone actually answers, it doesn’t necessarily make sense, just convinces me that I really am insane. The reality of life in Rome seems like some surreal dream and yet my real dreams are filled with a gentle guiding voice that murmurs incomprehensibly (if there really is a God out there, speak up, will you?). At this moment, all I see is a tiny glimmer of the road ahead seemingly leading to escape from this existential k-hole we call conventional life: take up your cross; go for something you can’t quite see through the haze but which resides somewhere between the Campo and Saint Peters, homes respectively of the saints and demons who haunt this place.
The only thing scary out there is the fear…racing up the spine and lapping the skin, a pure consuming burn – in the end, that is all we have to contend with.
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