The heart of Rome spreads out in the valley between the hills, like a patient autopsied and left exposed on the table. You can walk through it if you want, tracing the steps of emperors and peasants from the Colosseum down the Via Sacra. Doing this, you will pass the remnants of brick walls and marble floors and the columns of fallen temples, pieced back together until they jut from the earth like rigour-seized fingers.
Even before I set foot in Rome, I knew all these places by name. I had studied them in my spare time, through books and websites and online Yale courses, transfixed by the architecture, the urban arrangements, the remnants of a society so unlike the one we know, and yet so familiar we can still read its letters and see the blueprint of our own built environment where it was perfected, over two millennia ago.
The first time I laid eyes on the Colosseum, I cried. It was so beautiful, so massive, so commanding of attention; the years have done their damage, but the statement speaks as clear as the years it was built. No wonder they thought themselves the centre of the world; all the wealth of their universe flowed straight into Rome.
For many long days in Italy, I followed these roads, exploring ruins until my feet gave out and I settled onto toppled chunks of carved stone. There I would sit, for hours at a time, snapping photos and gazing at the foundations of crumbled basilicas, trying to piece their form back together in my mind.
Maybe I was just tired, by the end. But on my second-last night in Rome, standing on a terrace above Trajan’s market — cleverly branded as the first indoor shopping mall, but in truth used as imperial offices — I looked over the ruins. They still held beauty almost beyond description, resplendent in golden lights, silent under the spread tops of the stone pines. Still, in that moment, I felt some of the wonder that had so moved me through Rome ebbing away, and in its place arrived a far less romantic thought.
You know, it’s really just a pile of rocks.
When Michelangelo Buonarroti was just 23 years old, a French cardinal came to him with an offer: he wanted the young and relatively unknown artist to carve a sculpture for his tomb, with the caveat that it must be the most beautiful work of marble in all of Rome, a piece so magnificent that no living sculptor could hope to render its equal.
What is remarkable is not that Michelangelo, apparently considering this a reasonable request, took the commission; what is remarkable is that he then proceeded to do just that, creating a sculpture so breathtaking that even when it was new, art critics called it a “miracle” and admirers from across Europe and then the world flocked to see it.
Over 500 years later, they still do.
From the start, Michelangelo knew that his Pietà was special. He said that the block he carved it from was the most “perfect” piece of marble he had ever worked. He said that it was as if he could see the figures already existing in the stone and all he had to do was bring them out, letting God’s hand guide his chisel.
In person, sitting behind glass in a curtained-off nave of St. Peter’s Basilica, the Pietà is more stunning than any photo or words could do justice. It is radiant, brighter than everything else around it, as if the light shines from inside the stone — a quality of its Carrara marble, which allows particles of light to penetrate its surface to an unusual depth before being reflected back out.
It was mid-November, when I went to see it. There weren’t as many tourists in Rome as usual, it being both off-season and a pandemic, but I was still surprised at how few of the visitors roaming St. Peter’s Basilica seemed to notice the Pietà behind its dark curtain wall. A trickle of people came in; a trickle went out. At one point, for several pristine minutes, I was the only one beneath the perfectly draped hem of her robe.
So what do you do, when you find yourself alone before the Pietà? Do you pray? Do you weep? Do you demand that it tell you its secrets, explain what its sheer beauty means? Or do you fall to your knees, thanking whatever force rescued these figures, through Michelangelo’s hand, from where they were already alive in the rock?
I don’t know. I didn’t know what to do. So I stood there, resting my chin on my hands and my hands on the rail, gazing up at the sculpture, trying to commit every last inch to memory before I snapped a few photos and left. I hoped that, by doing this, I’d be able to recall every detail of its shape long after I was gone; but in the end, after I got home, I found I could not.
Now, when I think back to what it was like to stand before the Pietà, all I can see is the soft glow of its light, the lantern of eternal life that God coaxed out from a stone.
“Do you even know my name?”
The young man’s eyes grow wide with panic. He almost spits out his aperol spritz. I shouldn’t tease him like this: he’s too earnest, too gentle. I already knew the answer, owing to the fact that, over an hour into our acquaintance, this information had not been exchanged.
“No,” he stammers, embarrassed. “Do you know mine?”
I laugh, because I do.
This one, he’s different than the others. I don’t like the way men touch me in Rome, or in Naples. I don’t like the way the trattoria waiter cupped the back of my head. Don’t like the way a man hawking umbrellas by the train station caressed my arm to get my attention. I especially don’t like the way this young man’s loud friend grabs my thighs and squeezes tight as he leans in, nestling his nose into my neck.
“Do you like my friend?” the loud one breathes. His voice is sticky and sweet.
I pry his thumbs from where they are pressing into the tender spaces under my hip. Come on man, I say. I just met you guys. We’re just having a nice time hanging out.
“Yes, come on,” the gentler friend pipes up, his hesitant English making commas where ordinarily there are not. “We are just, having, a conversation.”
The Piazza Bellini is loud, but my new friend is quiet. He is a student. He wants to study engineering in Germany. He surprises himself by how well he’s managing in English; it’s the booze, he agrees, taking down his inhibitions. I tell him all about Canada, about its size, about its tear-stained history of Indigenous relations.
I don’t know if any of this interests him. But we’re just having a conversation.
Later, he comes to me the way a puppy does, hopeful and eager and whimpering. He forgets his English then, but the rising of his breath speaks a familiar language. Oh God, I think, as his fingers search for my waist, here we go again.
Stefano. His name is Stefano.
Can I be vulnerable for a moment, at this juncture?
I haven’t told this to many people. It sounds so pathetic, when said out loud, but here goes: I’m terrified of being abandoned. All I’ve ever wanted is for the people I let into my life to never go away. It’s been that way ever since I was a little girl clinging to my dad’s arm, asking for the thousandth time when he would stop being my father.
I don’t know why I’m like this. Maybe it’s because I’m adopted. Maybe it’s because, within days of my entering this world, the first and most important bond I had, the one my infant brain knew only as safe, was severed and then lost forever.
All I know is this:
what I fear more than anything else
is the people I love leaving.
but everyone leaves, whether
they want to or not,
so it’s easier if they don’t
really know you at all.
I knew he was waiting, in the city where he has been since the moment he curled up to wait for the end. It came for him quickly, when it did, but not so fast that he was spared the fear of the darkness, the heat, the choking clouds of ash. There’s little left of him now: just bones swaddled in plaster, and the shape of his terror.
This is why I went to Italy. To see this man, and those like him, and all the places they shopped and ate and slept. To see for myself the familiar shape of the cities they had built, the parts that are still so intuitive, they reveal the comfortable immortality of the mundane: cubbies to put your clothes in at the public baths. A mosaic in the entrance of a house reading “Beware of Dog.” That kind of thing. When the cities around Mt. Vesuvius were buried in the violent volcanic eruption of 79 AD, they didn’t preserve only vanity projects, as in Rome; they froze everyday life in stone.
By now, most of us know about the victim casts of Pompeii, but just in case some do not, here’s the story: in the 19th Century, archeologists digging into the city’s remains came across strange voids in its shroud of volcanic rock. The voids had bones in them, though any soft tissues had long since decayed. Soon, the archeologists began to pour plaster into the voids and let it harden, before chipping the rock away.
What emerged were the most uniquely wrenching scenes from ancient history that we have ever found. The casts are detailed enough to show the victims’s ages, their faces, the clothes they were wearing. They made casts of slaves, of dogs, of horses, of babies. They made casts of a group of people with a pickaxe, who died beside a hole they had made in a wall as they tried to tunnel out through buried buildings. They found casts of two men clutching hands, and casts of 13 people huddled against one city wall in a desperate bid to escape.
As more of Pompeii slowly emerges, archeologists are still making new casts today.
Each cast, as they come out of the rock, tells a story of life and death more viscerally than any other artifact could accomplish. Seeing the casts requires no tour guide and no context to explain the significance: we know in an instant what they were feeling. We see it in the hunch of their shoulders and the last bends of their limbs.
These people are still speaking to us, though they died alone, nearly 2,000 years ago. We know them through this universal human language. We know them not by their bodies, but by the space they left behind.
Some of the casts aren’t with us anymore, having been damaged when Pompeii was bombed in the Second World War. That’s the thing about the casts: they began as an absence of someone, not a presence of something. They are moments frozen in time, and like all moments, can only be made once, and never again: once they are poured and removed from the rock, the void the casts captured is gone.
Here’s one last thing I think about a lot: the buildings of Pompeii, as well as its less-famous but even more well-preserved neighbour, Herculaneum, are actually in much better condition where they still lie under the rock, than in what we now see of them. They’re safe there, where nothing can reach them. It’s just that, the moment we dig them out and bring them back to the light, they start to fall apart.
Someone asked me what would be left of Winnipeg, should the earth heave up its guts and cover us over, like a jealous paramour claiming her lover, and now wherever I look I see the bones we will leave past the end of our world.
Pop bottles. Stone. Concrete house foundations, yawning beside broken roads. Wood won’t survive, but skyscraper ribs will still lie entombed beside rusted lampposts and miles of flattened plastic, undulating like veins of gold in an untapped mine. The city would sleep like this for a very long time, holding our little secrets for some future archeologist to find, until, at last, all is ground into dust.
So, knowing that all we have built will someday be lost, what happens to us?
We cling to each other in lamplight. We scratch words in bathroom stalls. We reach for each other with conversations that begin “do you remember that time?” Furtively affirming the stories we share, each memory offered as part kiss and part prayer: don’t forget me. I was here, we were here and, for a flicker of time that fled when the dawn caught the night, we were there.
Did you see me?
Everyone we leave behind carves a space in the mind. Voids, where once was life.
I saw the Pope, when I went to the Vatican. It was an accident, I didn’t mean to, it all happened so fast. It’s 5 a.m. in Rome and I’m on my bed, jet-lagged and failing to find sleep. On Instagram, a friend mentions the Wednesday general audience, and now I’m on the street; now I’m on a bus; now I’m being shepherded through security lines and hallways by the Swiss Guards; now I’m in a cavernous room bathed in clinically white light and there he is, on the stage, watched by a thousand rapturous eyes.
I watch him, thinking about how he is heir to an unbroken line stretching back to an empire that consumed all it coveted, until it grew so large it could no longer bear its own weight. When it collapsed into ruin, it left the machinery of a religion so vast it would continue that work of consuming, spreading over the world until everything it touched had been at least partly remade.
I think about how “pontifex maximus” was originally what the ancient Romans called the priest chosen to oversee the Vestal Virgins. I think about how, in the pile of rocks beside the Colosseum, I wandered through what is left of the House of the Vestals, the place where they lived out their divine service to the increasingly rapacious state.
Now, I am a black sheep in the flock, listening to a different Pontifex Maximus speak.
When the Pope begins to move through the room, the crowd surges up and sweeps me to the barricade with them. They weep as he walks past. They hold up their babies for him to bless. They chatter in English and Spanish and Tagalog and French, unifying their voices in one shared word: Papa, they cry out. Papa, Papa, Papa. A woman’s arm shoots over my shoulder, straining to get just a few inches closer. Papa, Papa.
He passes so close I can hear the rustling of his cassock under the din. For a moment, I have a clear view of his face. It would be easy to reach for an adjective like “beatific,” to say that one instantly recognized him as less man than possible future saint; but in truth, he is just a man, bright-eyed and small, face moulded into a smile that is elfin but plastic. Popes are essentially fungible, I think. It could be any man in his place, so long as he too had been birthed in white smoke, white robes, and a new name.
Papa, Papa, Papa.
What a sad life, I think. To belong to everyone, but no-one at all.
When I opened my eyes that morning, my birthday, the first thing I saw was my friend Devin, posed beside a knife of white winter light stabbing through the hotel curtains. The first words I heard on that morning, my birthday, were that he loved me, that he wanted the best day for me, and that he was glad I was there.
I wriggled into the blanket and blinked back a few grateful tears.
After he left, I studied the ache in my bones. I hadn’t slept much, not that night or that week, and I was a little bit hungover, albeit respectably so. Just two days before, I’d fled home from Rome, done my laundry, repacked my luggage and struck out for the west, to Saskatoon, where the Canadian Olympic curling trials were beginning.
We’re all pulled to places where we feel a sense of belonging.
The truth was, my trip to Italy sucked. I felt guilty saying that, given the privilege of travel; but I’d spent most of the trip damp and at least a little bit miserable. I’d loved losing myself among the rocks; I loved feeling the weight of an empire risen and lost. The dead cities of Italy seduced me, but the living ones turned me off.
The loneliness that stalked me through Italy surprised me. I like travelling alone, free to explore as I please, to meet people, to roam. Two years before, I’d done a solo trip to Japan and cherished every minute, even in the depths of my grief; so I thought this trip would be similar, all peace and delight and going with the wind.
Yet every night, laid out on the flat mattresses of my cheap hotel rooms, I found myself aching to get back to my home, my friends, and my life.
Saskatoon, I hoped, would be the cure for that lonely. A long-awaited return to one of the few places I’ve ever felt I truly belonged. Not the city, but the village that sprung up inside it, a nomadic encampment of late nights and groaning rocks. A curling city, dismantled and rebuilt several times over every winter, as it crosses the country from Penticton to St. John’s: the Olympic trials. The Scotties. The Brier.
Ask why I love curling, and I’ll give you this answer: it’s the sport, but it’s the people, and the village they build together. It’s the way we talk shit on the media bench until everything around us is funny, and return to rooms where we share the softest parts of ourselves in voices that barely rise above murmur. It’s how the only price of admission is that you love the sport the way everyone there does, which is helplessly. It has you, and you can’t get away, and now you have somewhere you belong.
It’s the creeping through hotel hallways. It’s the knowing the rhythms of the week to come: morning draw, afternoon draw, evening draw and then drinks. It’s the waking up on your birthday, tired but surrounded by love; that morning, for a couple of slow hours huddled under the duvet, that was enough.
That day, and for three more after, I watched curling by day and sipped cocktails all over Saskatoon by night. I laughed a lot. I let my mind slide out with the yellow- and red-handled granite rocks, admiring the precision of where they came to rest, finding their way to within a hair’s breadth of what was intended.
Granite is old, you know. It’s one of the oldest igneous rocks on the planet. Every time a curler pushes off from the hack, they are creating a moment 300 million years in the making. Someday, archeologists working in our ruins will find curling rocks, still clad in their yellow and red hats. They will puzzle over these objects, and try to reconstruct what they think must have been the rules of the game.
This is what they will say: “Look, they played sports, just like us.”
On the drive home from Saskatoon, I had nine hours to to think about things lost and found, things reclaimed from the earth or left deep in the ground. About how sad it is, that not all the things we cherish can remain. But then again, if you’re lucky, then you live long enough to see all sorts of things buried, and there some things must stay.
You never know what will fall apart when brought back up to light.
Still, as I crossed the border home to Manitoba, I couldn’t help but excavate the ruins of my memories, pausing to honour the spaces where people lived, noticing the voids they'd left, and will leave, behind.
There are a lot of things I wish I could find ways to say, but I can’t.
The day before I left Italy, I made one last pilgrimage, to a curiously lesser-known ruin called Ostia Antica. In antiquity, it was the main port of Rome, the mouth that sucked all the wealth of their known world; a dense and bustling hub of some 100,000 people, until the empire fell and the city that fed it was abandoned.
There are no body casts in Ostia. It wasn’t destroyed. Eventually, everyone just left.
The skies wept for most of the morning. The site, all 50 hectares, was nearly empty of visitors. For eight hours, I had the whole place to myself. I scampered solo through its delights, discovering the remains of warehouses and apartments and a restaurant that, nearly 2,000 years since anyone last ate there, still has its menu painted on the wall. I climbed stairs to second floors that have long since collapsed, and peered at the long benches of latrines beside public baths. I tried to imagine the city as it was, vivid with red plaster and loud voices and the sharp scent of warm skin.
At the edge of the city, a stone road sloped past the foundations of grand houses and small shops until it reached a field of verdant green, bordered by broken walls. In one corner sat a humble square platform, accessed by rain-glazed marble steps. Nearby, a plaque announced this as the temple of Cybele, or mater deum magna, mother of gods; the field was where her cultists performed rituals to earn her favour.
There, atop the marble steps, I sat for awhile and, with the help of a teacher taken on the tongue, let the moment be peaceful. Cats prowled the tops of fallen temples; light burst through gaps in the clouds. In the field, daisies caught the wind and danced out a joyful choreography, smiling as they performed for an audience of just me and the sun.
Suddenly, it seemed as if all the beauty in the world was welling up from the old bones of Ostia, rising into a radiant flood that surged over the field and the ruins until it had drowned the whole Earth. And I thought about the dead cities, about these stones that held daily patterns we would still find familiar, about the lingering traces of where the ancients had lived and loved and ate and slept and fucked. Just like us.
It’s just a pile of rocks. All of it, ever, is only just a pile of rocks.
There, alone in the house of Cybele, I started laughing. I laughed until it chased the birds from the bushes, laughed until my cheeks flushed like wine and roses, laughed until the sound played a duet with the returning rain.
Nothing is ever really ruined. Not cities, not stories, not hearts. Everything we build is only what we make of it, so: bury what no longer serves you. Go where the wind takes you. Love when you’re called to, leave your memories safe where you found them, and lose yourself on the rocks.
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