I’ve spent the day missing Italy. It’s all Moira Egan’s fault. She’d sent a sweet note about the piece I’d posted yesterday, and I was reminded that she lived in Rome, and before the envy completely overwhelmed me, I went back and reread some of Moira’s wonderful BAP posts from Italy. That was it; it was all over. I was suddenly in total Roman free fall. You can have April in Paris; I want May in Rome.
There is a special quality to the light in Rome in May, a burnished resonance that alters subtly as one walks the streets or the paths of the parks. If a sirocco has happened recently to arrive — those wind-blown reddish powers of North African soil mixing with the exploding yellow pollens of the cypress — then one wakes the next morning to an astonishing display that has been deposited upon the cars and piazzas, a swirl of colors like desert sands pottery, a series of natural canvases looking as if Buddhist or Navajo sand painters had discovered a love of Pollack.
And always the light, warm and palpable, the odd stroking quality of that warmth, as if it were the hand of a lover, or a parent, or a ghost with a fever. Even the rank scent of diesel drifting along the streets seems mitigated by that light as it cascades off the stones and bricks of the buildings lining those streets, whether they are streets that are really ancient, narrow and crooked lanes where the light can only fall like spare and random needles into the shadows below, or whether they are avenues that are as broad as Mussolini’s forehead, those expanses of civic proclamation that grow slowly lit by the afternoon’s dissolving banners and scattered confetti of sunlight. That exquisite light, which seems always to be in the act of falling.
In mid-December of the year I lived in Rome, I was walking up the Corso — Rome’s main drag — with Trude Schnackenberg (who is, I believe, one of our greatest poets), both of us a little dazzled by a day of rippling sunlight and stiff breezes ratting the tops of the palms nearby. I was flying back to the States, to Baltimore (where I then lived), and I knew that there had been an unseasonably bitter cold that had paralyzed that part of the Atlantic seaboard. I remember thinking at that moment, Why can’t I live in a place like this, where all through December the sun swacks the palms and where, in spring, the air feels alchemically charged? I knew it was all just an accident of Mediterranean geography, but it felt at the time like a metaphysically and morally charged question.
And then, of course, two years later, I moved to just such a place. I moved to Venice Beach, where I still live, on a street lined with palms, a street with wild parrots who, each spring, nest at the tops of those palms, to be swatted by the extraordinary beach-lit sunlight. I know; it’s pretty glorious. It’s embarrassingly beautiful. And trust me, I’ve consoled myself with this for hours this afternoon. I know I have no right to complain about anything, really. Yet, even though this May I can walk just a few blocks and watch a brilliant, flaming penny sink into the Pacific and fade at the horizon as le rayon vert flashes (whew — ok, I apologize for that one), even though the raucous conversations of chattering parrots can easily compete with the farting Vespas and exhaust-popping Fiats, even though the physical display of Venice Beach can be as heart-stopping as that along the Via Condotti, I still miss that visceral Roman light, that familiar hand and its warmth — still awaiting me, I am convinced.
Just one more slap, just one more touch of those fingertips. It’s May in Rome. My body can tell, even at this distance. Just one quick espresso, and then, please, I’m ready. It seems so little to ask.
More light. More Roman light.