Anthony Doeer "Four Seasons in Rome"

Anthony Doerr won the Rome Prize form the American Academy of Arts and Letters and came to Rome to live on the hill overlooking Trastevere (the Gianicolo) at the American Academy with is wife and new-born twins. His book follows his adventures through Roman life, the most interesting of which seem to be things taken for granted when living at home, but when thrown in a new environment, become the real adventure.

Excerpts:

“In the months to come I will hear them called Italian pines, Mediterranean pines, stone pines, parasol pines, and umbrella pines – all the same thing: Pinus pinea. Regal trees, astounding trees, tress both unruly and composed at once, like princes who sleep stock-still but dream swarming dreams.” – p. 13

“What is Rome? Clouds. Church bells. The distant pinpricks or birds.” – p. 20

“Rome, it seems, seeds esoteric passions: there are scholars or staircases, scholars of keyholes.” – p. 20

“Bernini is polished, urbane, in love with the human body; Borromini is touchy, outlandish, more interested in pure geometry.” – p. 41

“I look up and realize I have been here before. Still, I’m lost.” – p. 42

“Rome: a contest between sun and shadow, kingdom and time, architecture and weeds.”
– p. 44

“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience – buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello – become new all over again.” – p. 54

“When you see the Pantheon for the first time, your mind caves in.” – p. 57

“Every era here, it seems, cannibalizes the previous one; everything is salvaged, recouped, reclaimed.” – p. 68

“To live here is to live partly in a world of fantasy – the twisting lanes, the slumbering statues, the winter sun small and cold behind the swaying heads of the pines.” – p. 73

“Here’s another duality of Rome: the way time here feels simultaneously immense and tiny.” – p. 79

“It is the puzzle of Rome that mesmerizes: its patience, its stratigraphy…” – p. 84

“You find your way in a place by getting lost in it.” – p. 87

“Rome is a broken mirror, the falling strap of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballast hidden beneath the surface.” – p. 89

“Too much beauty, too much input; if you’re not careful, you can overdose.” – p. 103

“Shauna says it’s a good thing I didn’t get to see snow sifting through the oculus of the Pantheon. Sometimes, she says, the things we don’t see are more beautiful than anything else.” – p. 111

“Love, something sweet to eat, and the quickening of the heart. What else is springtime about?” – p. 122

“Spring is not so much a season in Rome as an onslaught or colors: silver, gold, green.”
- p. 126

“What is Rome? It’s a place where a grown man can drive a tiny car called a Panda or a Musa (the Muse) or Punto (the Dot) or Stilo (the Stylus) or Picasso.” – p. 141

On Pope John Paul II’s funeral…

“It’s as if I’ve wandered into the biggest tailgate party in history, three days too long…” – p. 145

An old Italian saying…

“‘Always follow a fat pope with a skinny pope.’” – p. 148

“Are we here because we want to know who will become pope? Or are we here out of vanity – because we want to be able to say we were here? Both, of course.” – p. 153

Spoleto…

“Someday, I tell her, we’ll come back to Spoleto and sleep a night in the Hotel Gattapone, built into a Cliffside, and cross that fourtheenth-century bridge at dusk and walk the muddy trail that winds across the far side of the gorge to a picnic table above a ruined hermitage and drink a bottle of wine and eat pecorino cheese and walk back across the bridge in the full dark beneath the four naked bulbs, spaced a hundred feet apart, and our sons will run out in front of us.” – p. 161-2

Day trips…

“We step off the train into daydreams – no schedules, no grappling with writing, our children back in the city, dozing away, and here are the cramped, contorted alleys and distant gorges and sudden archways and painted shutters and always the burnishing, majestic light and the azure distances.” – p. 166

On summer…

“I carry along a notebook but hardly manage to open it; the heat is like having my brain removed and a bunch of hot, wet cotton stuffed behind my eyes.” – p. 171

On fountains…

“The best fountains are the pensive dribblers, the bubblers, the brimming basins, the damp backs of nymphs and centaurs, the petrified grotesquerie of Villa Sciarra.” – p. 172

“Think of the perpetual trickle of gossip, the hanging mists of rumor. These were the original office watercoolers.” – p. 173

On summer…

“The city is drugged with heat; the stones are dead; the streets devastatingly quiet. From one until four, no one moves.” – p. – 175

“They’ve been doing it forever here. There is graffiti over two thousand years old in the ancient port city of Ostia.” – p. 178

“Beneath the city that is the Italian language there are huge underground cities, Italo-Dalmatian, Tuscan, Latin, Greek, and beneath them catacombs of Oscan and Umbrian and Sabine, lightless tunnels opening to caverns, ghosts and bones, crypts opening to still deeper, fainter tunnels, the echoes of sentences in tribal languages that never had an alphabet in which to write them down.’ – p. 182

“But the history of violence is in the stones.” – p. 190

“I lived in Rome four seasons. I never made it through the gates between myself and the Italians. I cannot claim to have become, in even the smallest manner, Roman. And yet I can’t stop myself: a pen, a notebook, the urge to circumscribe experience.” – p. 201

Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome, copyright Anthony Doerr, 2007, published by Scribner, A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2008.