Yesterday Kate and Brendan and I went to the Sistine Chapel. To get there, you have to walk through the Vatican Museum for about a mile, through all these hallways filled with art. It was amazing. Amazing. I couldn’t even bring myself to take pictures. There was no one thing to capture. It was either all or nothing. So it will soar in my head forever instead. I think I can remember it. I will try to remember it.
There was this one thing that sticks out. In the Sistine Chapel, there was a golden yellow paint glowing behind Jesus. And on the right hand side, there was hell. And it was red. And everything else was blue, blue sky everywhere. And all I could focus on after a while were those light bursts of color. It became difficult to take it all in, the horror of all those people falling to the ground, so I just looked for color instead. So I will think about the colors forever whenever I try to remember yesterday.
I left Kate and Brendan and headed to Termini to meet Stefan, who was coming in from Bologna, where he had spent the night with some friends. Stefan was at a fancy residency the last six weeks, so he had some stories to share. We came back to the apartment and drank wine and enjoyed the sunshine. (The weather has been perfect here, by the way. Sunny and seventy.)
Later we met up with Kate and Brendan in Pigneto. We drank and ate, ate and drank. We talked and talked. We drank. We stumbled down the street, and found some weird little divey warehouse bar thing. We had to pay five euros to get a membership card, but the guy at the door gave us drink tickets because I am extremely adorable. There was a bad euro pop DJ who sang along every so often to the songs in a Not Good voice and everyone looked like a drug dealer and we danced like we were insane to this terrible music. And everyone thought I was Italian. (Everyone here thinks I am Italian. Italians stop me on the street and ask me for directions. I must have a generally authoritative cast to my face. I am always trying to be so tough.)
Then we bought some wine from a restaurant and went back to the apartment and drank more wine and played records and talked and talked. I love my friends. I love Rome.
And now all I want to do is listen to Bob Dylan. That’s pretty much what Stefan and I have been doing all day. We walked to the market and bought eggs and cheese and bread and vegetables and then we came home and I made us breakfast and now we are listening to Bob Dylan. Hours of it. Sunning ourselves on the terrace. It is so epic.
God bless Bob Dylan.
