Circles in Squares (10)

Sometimes the city is quiet. On the White Night, on Notte Bianca, on the day where everyone stays awake until the next begins, we did not expect it to be quiet. But Oh, how disappointing Piazza Navona managed to be.
We approached in suspense, ready to wind through crowds, keep our pockets safe, our voices singing with midnight excitement. But when we arrived at the spacious piazza, the laggers gained fuel for their barrage of excuses. Navona's energy amounted to less than a murmur. The wide open space broke the dense population of the night into insignificant clusters, gathered at the edges of the three fountains. It was very quiet, and, I felt sleepable. But I was not ready to sleep. This expanse would not lull me to bed with its shadowed corners, its simultaneous sense of enclosure and dispersal from the three distant fountains. We needed to walk.
Stamina? I ain't heard of it. It was just past ten and we were damn near sprinting to the Pantheon. It's close, Schuyler informed us.
There were two things in the way: bodies, and chains. I chose the chains. On the side aisles of the main walkways, those metals ropes closed off a fifteen meter length of open sidewalk, and the hop into their passageway was worth it to me. Guided by the flexible rails, I would speed down the uncrowded pathways before hopping over the next linked barrier. Then I would wait for a second, let my heart beat against me in frustration at the confusing directions I was giving it, and with others caught up, dive back over a chain.
It really wasn't that close. Schuyler agreed. At the entrance to the Pantheon's piazza, we were frazzled by the strain of the crowd. We were led by a furiously-stepping Christina, black hair waving gracefully back and forth in the still dark sky. The night had not yet struck the hour of push and shove and so we rather wound. With the street opened up a bit we set off through standing circles, diagonally up steps, briskly past those other winders (head on and at our backs) with an inferior pace. And to get to the light, that great gleam emerging from the entrance of the Pantheon, we had to go around the fountain.
There is one fountain in the Pantheon piazza. An obelisk seems to spiral up into the sky from its center. As it points to the moonlit realm, its height seems to direct us further, towards the glorious dome. It was busy outside; it was night and, people did not have lunch destinations or, work to return to from a siesta. They stood there and filled the space, the one space: the space between the fountain, and the doorway. Our line of four twisted through the edge and, funneled into the doorway that seethed with light.
Inside, though, it was day, the lamp-lit oculus directed upward instead. The people stood bewildered, uncomprehending and without direction as they do in the day, as they did outside in the night. And along the walls, along that wondrous interior curve, each monument smiled with the respect of its own small, caring audience.
I was tired of spirit, tired altogether and, it was only the beginning of the night. Naturally, I was drawn to the birds, the ones that stand still; I knew that Rafael could console me.
In that glass box, the light collected softly, away from the brightness, the hustle of the center. I found a quietness unlike the disappointing stillness of the Navona. It was a peaceful movement, between the words, the wings, the body, the architectural piece just above. I wandered slowly, surrounded by enough people to form a wall, and I felt that I was the only one truly there, where my two feet were. The glass held me there with open arms, slowly flowing soft light over my head, as I seemed to lay my head on the stone in gazing at the light-hearted birds. Rafael - I do not know him. But I trust that he laid there and, calmly, gave me his own direction, into the nighttime dome of the Roman city.
A breath. I turned about, head down over the circles and squares lain attentively on the floor. With the top of my head and my feet and, a muffled grumble of 'scusi' I found the laces of the wall of bodies and, squeezed between the threads. As I did so, they wrapped themselves in behind me. Picking my head up a little, I saw over a few other shoulders and heads the other three, waiting. The floor seemed to spill out in a great arch beneath me, gradually sloping to the other side of the hill at which the waiting trio stood. It is a floor of gilded sand, striped sparsely with bold blocks of color. Its own soft color becomes the light, and the circles and squares upon the floor become the walls, as the interior itself reaches up towards the oculus, surrounding all, even the sky. Because the domed effect is so great, even the dark expanse beyond can be captured, and so, all is inside and outside at once. The fresh night air was there, and the hustled heat of the crowd - foreign and familiar. I did not know if I was inside, but we were going back out.
Approaching the three who were anxiously waiting to get back to the other lagging waiters in the Navona, I needed to pause. I took Rafael's breath in me, and felt the roundness of it all. Even the light curved, as it dropped like dew on the heads of the amazed and as it turned to grey green in the coffered ceiling. I felt the dome held me all at once like a safe womb, or tomb, like a welcoming kitchen, like an open prairie lit by the deep night sky. The Pantheon truly was a polytheistic place of worship, because it was created as a whole, as a structure that captures that which enters no matter if they are outside its walls or have just left. Its interior is in its oculus which is in the sky which is in the fountain in the Piazza.
We walked towards the fountain, and into the movement.
It was tiresome to move back to the Navona, but I had Rafael's breath in me. I had learned to slow more, to think of the coming night, and to watch my tiredness. We moved as a group, in our weaving line, through the narrow alleys, narrowed further by the lines of nighttime visitors, and arrived at the rectangular opening that feels of Piazza.
It is from these openings that, the rectangular tunnel of the Roman alleyways becomes a pot, steaming over into the cobblestone plain, a place where the light filters through, past the individual lamps of street-inhabiting restaurants, where the sound becomes lighter, drifting into the openness past the walls. It is another vertical rectangle, but one that thins with an imminent end. And it was from that rectangle that we entered the Navona to the right of the four rivers fountain.
It was still composed of clusters, but they were clusters formed with more stature, more purpose of the night in their spines. Still, some encircled the fountains but, the rectangular form of the Piazza has built on itself, on these columns of visitors, and had taken shape with the depth of night. The light here was a pale blue, hazed by the length of the great cobblestone plateau. There were corners but, these were less visible with the rounded groups of figures making up the floor of the space. And the walls that climbed upwards from this place once a stadium, flew into the sky, away into open above and hectic nearby.
This was a place for waiting, before a climb - such as the determined steps of Vittorio Emanuele, the upright confidence of the Colliseum, the strong sense of direction of the Via del Corso.
We found our own purposeful cluster, waiting, lingering, and headed towards the Roman mass.