But Pliny can be sweetly, perfectly astute, too. “Whales,” he writes, “have their mouths in their foreheads and consequently when swimming on the surface of the water they blow clouds of spray into the air.”15 He understands the earth is spherical; he carefully traces how daylight varies with latitude. And, fifteen hundred years before the invention of the microscope, he manages to make some sublime observations about insects, bees in particular.
Read a certain way, the Natural History is preposterous, full of erroneous assumptions and cast-off mythology. Read another way, it is a window into Roman understanding two millennia ago. Read another way, it is a tribute to wonder itself.
For the past sixteen years, pretty much every single day, I’ve penciled a journal entry into a spiral notebook. It is a practice field, an exercise bike; I write in it to try to stay in writing shape. In Boise, most mornings, I sit over a blank page and squeeze out a paragraph, then start writing fiction. During this first month in Italy, I sit down and two hours disappear and I’ve filled five pages.
I write in my notebooks, change diapers, buy groceries. I fry pancetta with a child strapped to my back. I conduct a phone interview with the Washington Post with a child strapped to my chest. By the time we bathe the boys, fight them into pajamas, and pile them into their cribs, it is usually seven thirty or eight. We cook dinner. We read. We go to bed. Twenty minutes later Shauna is asleep. I am not. I read about drool rash online, I try to decipher ingredients in Italian baby formula. Idrolisato di caseina. Minerali enzimatici. Are these good things to put into an infant?
I wander on and off the terrace, I try drawing pictures of trees in a notepad. On the National Sleep Foundation website I read, “In the long term, the clinical consequences of sleep deprivation are associated with numerous, serious medical illnesses, including…high blood pressure, heart attack, heart failure, stroke, psychiatric problems, mental impairment, and poor quality of life.”16
A bundle of marguerites, tied with black ribbon and leaning against the corner of the Porta San Pancrazio, has wilted and fallen to the pavement. I pick up the bouquet and reposition it against the stone, but it falls again, and I worry the drivers in the cars whizzing past will think I’m being disrespectful so I take the brake off the stroller and hurry home with the milk.
Saint Pancratius: fourteen years old when he was martyred. His job in heaven is to avenge perjurers.
It’s the second of November, election day in the United States. Around noon a sudden wind slams my studio door and I hear the little framed sign (The Tom Andrews Studio, Fellow, American Academy in Rome ’00) shatter on the tile in the hall. I open the door and pile slivers of glass into the trash can thinking, Omen. Pliny whispers in my ear, “Different days pass verdict on different men and only the last day a final verdict on all men; and consequently no day is to be trusted.”17
An hour later my editor e-mails to tell me the New York Times will run a halfhearted review of my newly published novel on Sunday that includes the sentence “Doerr’s interest in nature is so obsessive that the whole equation of man in nature becomes heavily skewed in favor of the latter, producing fiction of rapturous beauty but of an oddly cold, uninvolving nature, as if it were embalmed in its own lustrous style.”18
Great. Embalm: to preserve a corpse from decay, originally with spices, now usually by the arterial injection of a preservative. I blunder up the stairwell and into the apartment and stand over the toilet awhile, waiting for something to pass.
Still, after the boys are asleep, after dinner, I actually manage to fall into something like sleep. I dream of knights and haberdashers and a psychologist tapping a white pen on a red notebook. Around 5 a.m. Shauna wakes me to tell me George W. Bush has won Ohio and Florida and will be president of the United States for four more years.
Ten minutes later the boys are crying. We carry them in laps around the apartment and feed them milk. Henry grabs for my index finger and won’t let go. A rash circling Owen’s throat has descended his sternum and is now crowding his chest, pink and raw.
“Omens,” I tell Shauna. “Don’t you feel like everything is going to end badly?”
Henry settles down. The nipple of Owen’s bottle collapses and formula dribbles onto his pajamas. He begins to cry again.
“Not everything,” Shauna says.
The leaves of plane trees skid through the streets like pages from some strange and ancient manuscript. In a latteria near the Pantheon we buy a kilogram of Parmigiano for fourteen euros. The gray-haired proprietor, wearing his white coat, a scientist of cheese, hacks our wedge off a wheel the size of a spare tire. Sixteen liters of milk, he tells us, went into this one kilogram. He wraps it in cellophane and waxed paper. It sits in our refrigerator and glows, shot through with crystals like some fabled hunk of mineral. It tastes like nutmeg and brine and cream; we eat slices as if it were cake.
The botanist Carl Linnaeus, I read once, could tell the time of day by observing when certain flowers opened and closed in his garden. I gaze out my studio window, past the trunk of the umbrella pine. How does one get to be that involved in the world?
Reinhold is messing with me about the parrots, I’m sure of it.
In the middle of November I finally get our names onto one of the overloaded Academy sign-up sheets. We leave the boys with Tacy. From a courtyard in Campo Marzio, a neighborhood near the Pantheon, a composer named Lee Hyla leads a dozen Academy fellows into a dripping, cramped basement that smells of mold. Three of us at a time take turns peering from archaeologists’ scaffolding at a patch of wet earth fifteen feet below. In a space the size of a small bedroom, beneath a film of water, is a sliver of a two-thousand-year-old sundial—markings on a piazza that was once a hundred meters across.
It is the Orologio of Augustus, Lee tells us. The sundial was oriented so that the shadow of an obelisk, long since moved to another part of the city, Piazza di Monte-citorio, fell across the hour, day, and month. The hash marks were bronze rods inlaid in the paving, and the obelisk, like just about all the obelisks of Rome, had been stolen from Africa and brought across the Mediterranean on a barge.
Think of that sundial, all that bronze burning in the sun. Think of those barges, a 170-ton granite needle laid from bow to stern, wallowing in the sea.
This, I’m learning, is what the American Academy seems to be about: a bird-watching, expressionistic jazz composer from Boston teaching us about the solar clocks of emperors. I lie awake reading about obelisks, the obelisk of Ramses, the obelisk of Psammetichus II. History lies beneath the city like an extensive and complicated armature. Emperors were stabbed beneath tramlines. Sheep grazed beneath supermarkets. The thirteen obelisks of Rome have been toppled and reerected and shuffled around so many times that to lay a map of their previous positions over a map of their current ones is to evoke a miniature cross-hatching of the city’s entire memory, a history of power and vanity like a labyrinth stamped beneath the streets.
I wander the library and read about Gianlorenzo Bernini, the seventeenth-century sculptor, painter, and architect who at ten years old was summoned in front of Paul V to draw a portrait (the pope asked Bernini to draw St. Paul and, upon seeing the result, declared the boy would “be the Michelangelo of his age”); who was already being commissioned to carve marble busts at age twelve; who carved the leaking stone boat in the Piazza di Spagna; who was the most celebrated artist of his age. Who could peer into the white cliffs of a marble quarry and see, trapped inside a block of stone, Neptune’s forearm, say, or a coil of Persephone’s hair.
I learn I prefer Bernini’s recalcitrant rival, an ex-pupil named Francesco Borromini, a stonecutter’s son, introverted, suicidal, insanely gifted. Bernini is polished, urbane, in love with the human body; Borromini is touchy, outlandish, more interested in pure geometry. Borromini’s