02/26
jazz & sushi, penitence & celebration, & a castle on a cliff.
February was both rapid in passing & slow in its duration. I had previously commiserated with my classmates about how short our time here in Rome really is, but that was before we had realized that every day was packed with two or three days’ worth of events. It’s only been twenty-eight days, but it feels like two months have gone by. At the very least, I have two months of memories— memories of the new, of the now-familiar, of what grates on me & of what I never want to leave behind.
Jazz & sushi
On the 13th, I and a few of my girlfriends put on cocktail dresses and took the bus to Fontana di Trevi, where we wandered down an alley to find a hole-in-the-wall jazz bar. We almost missed it— just a door and a tiny sign, tucked away behind a tabbaccheria, which opened up to a warmly lit bar and soft recorded jazz settling into all the crevices of low Italian conversation from the chairs around. We had reserved seats in the upper room, where the jazz band was to begin playing live at 7pm, so the hostess led us up tall & narrow stairs to a room with only a few tables and a piano washed in neon blue light. Besides the neon, the room was only illuminated by low, underlit lamps that cast a romantic kind of orange across tables & faces.
The cocktails were flavorful & well-crafted; the sushi was so fantastic that I and C ordered extra; the music was the perfect complement to the cozy sophistication upstairs. We stayed for two hours, sipping, whispering, & pulling out our digicams at any opportunity. There’s a great beauty in doing something that is more elegant, and so calls you to be. In two hours, we became the kind of women who could go enjoy signature drinks & live music, dressed our best, in the company of those we love. I looked around the table and thought: they are the smartest, kindest, most beautiful women I know, and they’re sitting here with me. If it takes jazz to realize these things, I’m going to begin listening to more Oscar Peterson.
Penitence & celebration
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the liturgical season of Lent, a time of fasting, praying, & almsgiving. The archbishop of Sydney, on a visit to Rome, invited my class to attend mass at the chapel besides Domus Australia, and to share a fast-breaking dinner with him and assorted seminarians & priests directly afterwards.
Before Mass, I sat surrounded by somber penitents kneeling in black. I opened my journal, my fingers shivering from low blood sugar, and scribbled out desperate promises to God. I’ll do this; I won’t do that; I’ll only do this sometimes. I’m so bad, I’m so sorry, I’ll have the perfect Lent to make up for all of it. Half of a page, in cramped cursive, elaborating on how I was going to earn my way into goodness, into blessedness, & into love.
Throughout the first half of Mass, during readings & hymns, I kept repeating the desperate promises in my head. Then Father stood for the homily: “The first sin,” he said, “was trying to take what was supposed to be a gift.”
Father recounted the glory of Lucifer, highest of all the angels, who out of pride & envy sought to grasp the majesty which God had freely given him. He spoke of Adam & Eve, who were given perfect communion with the Good and yet still tore the apple from the tree. He spoke of Christ, the opposite of these: receiving all blessings & all trials which the Father laid upon Him, in perfect obedience. “How often do we reach out and try to take from God that which He wants to give us?” Father asked, in his peculiar Irish-Italian-Australian accent.
I looked down at my page with all of its promises, and I realized that they were not bargains but demands. I was telling my Lord that I was going to take holiness, to take peace, to take sanctification, and I was listing my means of doing so. Never once had I written anything close to, Lord, what do You want me to practice this Lent? There was the problem that had birthed my panic & desperation. I lacked trust. So then, as Father prepared the altar for communion, I finally did ask God what it was He wanted me to do— how it was He wanted to shape me.
I am here in Rome as a student; I am here in Lent as a penitent. My special vocation at the moment is to enjoy & partake of Rome in ways that I will forever after be unable to do, and it is the balance between celebration & penitence that the Lord is asking me to strike this spring. I fasted on Ash Wednesday, and yet after Mass I had a candlelit dinner of fish & wine with Archbishop Fisher. We sang in choir for the seminarians, and my classmates recited poetry. We exchanged introductions with the archbishop and knelt for a blessing from him. Afterwards, we all took the same bus home, warm from wine, and laughed at our great victory at the start of Lent.
A castle on a cliff
A large group of us took a day trip from Rome to Orvieto, which is in the Umbrian region of Italy. It is the only region which is completely landlocked, and it took us two hours by train to get there (two glorious hours of listening to music & staring at scenery).
The first great draw of Orvieto is that it is an ancient fortification on a cliff. We ascended the mountain and crossed through half-crumbling parapets to emerge on warmly lit cobblestone streets, only ten minutes from the center of the town. We were buzzing from early morning caffeine & our two hours of anticipation, and rushed towards the center, where a huge church towered over the piazza. The facade was all relief sculpture which connected the whole of salvation history, from Creation to the Final Judgment, and the sides were striped black & ivory. Our program director, HOC, told us the story of the Eucharistic miracle which is housed within the church. We stood on ground which had been untainted throughout war & natural disaster, and HOC said, “I truly believe it is only by the intercession of Our Lady.”
After we toured the church, in hushed reverence, we were set free with only vague recommendations to constrain us: try the wild boar, try the white wine, try the truffles; look into the ceramics shops; check out the fortifications.
Our first stop was a small & gorgeous restaurant where only one woman spoke English, which is how we knew it would be delicious. We ordered the bruschetta di oggi, which had two different truffle spreads on it, and I tried pasta with wild boar sauce. It was just as good as everyone had said, and the house white wine was some of the best I’d ever had. It laid so lightly on the tongue, and it was so fresh in comparison to the deep spice of the wild boar, that we all wished we’d ordered a little more. As it was, we had enough to know that HOC had not steered us wrong, and not enough for it to slow us down on the rough cobblestone streets we wandered down afterwards.
The weather was gorgeous, all blue sky and strong sun, but not too warm for our sweaters. Our group split off alley by alley, until C & I were alone in our hunt for gelato. On the way there, we found a vintage photo booth & got our €3’s worth in laughter & surprisingly sweet photo strips. We found a sweet cat who purred on the hood of a vintage car; we found pink flowers bursting through an iron fence; finally, we found our gelato, and wandered into the golden-washed park for an hour of pure leisure.
While C napped, I sketched & wrote in my journal. The sun was near the edge of the horizon, but not quite touching it. Children shrieked on the playground as their parents laughed warmly on park benches, and I could make out my classmates wandering the parapets. Soft curls of cigarette smoke gathered above their heads as they surveyed the valley far below us. The light was warm on my hair & back. Birds called from tree to rustling tree. I closed my eyes; this was the beauty that Our Lady had protected time after time, for the miracle of her Son and for the devotion of her devotees. All in all, it was a good day.
This is so true! Beautiful!!