Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
Anthony Doerr

On the same day that his wife gave birth to twins, Anthony Doerr received the Rome Prize, an award that gave him a year-long stipend and studio in Rome…‘Four Seasons in Rome’ charts the repercussions of that day, describing Doerr's varied adventures in one of the most enchanting cities in the world, and the first year of parenthood. He reads Pliny, Dante, and Keats – the chroniclers of Rome who came before him – and visits the piazzas, temples, and ancient cisterns they describe. He attends the vigil of a dying Pope John Paul II and takes his twins to the Pantheon in December to wait for snow to fall through the oculus. He and his family are embraced by the butchers, grocers, and bakers of the neighbourhood, whose clamour of stories and idiosyncratic child-rearing advice is as compelling as the city itself.This intimate and revelatory book is a celebration of Rome, a wondrous look at new parenthood and a fascinating account of the alchemy of writers.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.

Four Seasons in Rome

On Twins, Insomnia and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

Anthony Doerr

Copyright (#ulink_7e8b8037-9f26-556c-960c-dffe2413e233)

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)

Originally published in the United States in 2007 by Scribner

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2008

This ebook edition published by 4th Estate in 2016

Copyright © Anthony Doerr 2007

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

The right of Anthony Doerr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © June 2010 ISBN: 9780007390533

Version: 2016-12-01

for Henry and Owen

Rain falls, clouds rise, rivers dry up, hailstorms sweep down; rays scorch, and impinging from every side on the earth in the middle of the world, then are broken and recoil and carry with them the moisture they have drunk up. Steam falls from on high and again returns on high. Empty winds sweep down, and then go back again with their plunder. So many living creatures draw their breath from the upper air; but the air strives in the opposite direction, and the earth pours back breath to the sky as if to a vacuum. Thus as nature swings to and fro like a kind of sling, discord is kindled by the velocity of the world’s motion.

PLINY THE ELDER, FROM THE

Natural History, AD 77

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Contents

Cover (#u36fbea39-92fa-5221-87f7-85abaab05880)

Title Page (#u27772c79-b521-5389-8713-4a349a86afc5)

Copyright (#u08d5ea68-bfb0-5f85-a0a8-cf84befb4d2d)

Dedication (#u4e03df33-dd82-5f5a-9216-05ed933ac753)

Epigraph (#ua73d940a-800c-5e99-874e-3270d4d270a5)

FALL (#ua2d31a29-9824-5eca-a344-a6a254ccd17b)

WINTER (#u11b46785-1f7c-5bdb-8a51-4f8e1f588b0d)

SPRING (#litres_trial_promo)

SUMMER (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Anthony Doerr (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

FALL (#ulink_3307e294-5a59-54c7-bab7-c10c740464bf)

ITALY LOOMS. WE MAKE CHECKLISTS—DIAPERS, CRIB bedding, a book light. Baby formula. Two dozen Nutri-Grain bars. We have never eaten Nutri-Grain bars in our lives, but now, suddenly, it seems important to have some.

I stare at our new Italian-to-English pocket dictionary and worry. Is “Here is my passport” in there? Is “Where for God’s sake can I buy some baby wipes?”

We pretend to be calm. Neither of us is willing to consider that tomorrow we’ll pile onto an Airbus with six-month-old twins and climb to thirty-seven thousand feet and stay there for fourteen hours. Instead we zip and unzip our duffels, take the wheels off the stroller, and study small, grainy photos of St. Peter’s on ricksteves.com.

Rain in Boise; wind in Denver. The airplane hurtles through the troposphere at six hundred miles per hour. Owen sleeps in a mound of blankets between our feet. Henry sleeps in my arms. All the way across the Atlantic, there is turbulence; bulkheads shake, glasses tinkle, galley latches open and close.

We are moving from Boise, Idaho, to Rome, Italy, a place I’ve never been. When I think of Italy, I imagine decadence, dark brown oil paintings, emperors in sandals. I see a cross-section of a school-project Colosseum, fashioned from glue and sugar cubes; I see a navy-blue-and-white soap dish, bought in Florence, chipped on one corner, that my mother kept beside her bathroom sink for thirty years.

More clearly than anything else, I see a coloring book I once got for Christmas entitled Ancient Rome. Two babies slurped milk from the udders of a wolf. A Caesar grinned in his leafy crown. A slinky, big-pupiled maiden posed with a jug beside a fountain. Whatever Rome was to me then—seven years old, Christmas night, snowflakes dashing against the windows, a lighted spruce blinking on and off downstairs, crayons strewn across the carpet—it’s hardly clearer now: outlines of elephants and gladiators, cartoonish palaces in the backgrounds, a sense that I had chosen all the wrong colors, aquamarine for chariots, goldenrod for skies.

On the television screen planted in the seat-back in front of me, our little airplane icon streaks past Marseilles, Nice. A bottle of baby formula, lying sideways in the seat pocket, soaks through the fabric and drips onto my carry-on, but I don’t reach down to straighten it for fear I will wake Henry. We have crossed from North America to Europe in the time it takes to show a Lindsay Lohan movie and two episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond. The outside temperature is minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit.