The dusk has settled in this chilly autumn evening and your purposefully aimless walk away from the bright elegance of Piazza Navona brings you to small neighborhood shops and cozy Trattorias scattered on both sides of the narrow streets where unhurried pedestrians are ambling under leafy  trees coated with bird droppings. The smilingly furtive glances on many faces welcome you from a distance. They are happy to have you found them; and the little man in his smart hat walking excitably holding your hand definitely draws out their affection, but the buona sera carries with it a frank admission of difference and diffidence, a memory of otherness. Maybe even a hint of suffering?

She says out loud what you feel you have been struggling to accept,”this feels like home.” It does indeed. It is a familiarity of the most unfamiliar kind, as if you have stepped into someone else’s dream only to find it is taking place in your own living room.

For a fraction of a second you have that vertiginous sensation of not knowing who you are and where you have found yourself to be: a momentary loss of the weight of identities, a loss that enriches you with a sense of beguiling freedom. Then the moment passes and you catch yourself falling into nothing. The world around you finds its solidity again and you are back walking on these enigmatic streets. You are in the eternal city.  The Great Beauty.

Like all great beauties she has been mercilessly cruel too. In spurts of deathly violence, torture, iniquities. But she also seduces you endlessly in one enigmatic layer after another, in a profusion of charms both earthly and exotic, in a heady brew of potions that carry within it the entire spectrum of western civilization. So the hauntingly atmospheric evening in this what used to be Ghetto di Roma no longer speaks of the three centuries of enforced poverty and humiliation. Maybe except for in the diffidence in the voice of those who carry the imprint of that time in their collective memories? Or was that your imagination?

Nothing imaginary about Giordano Bruno’s statue, a few minutes walk down Via dei Giubbonari. Concrete, towering, unmistakably present at the same spot in Campo de Fiori where his living body was burned to ashes. Bruno the polymath philosopher, Bruno the scientist monk, Bruno the poet theologian, Bruno of the cosmological theories that find validation in contemporary science. But unlike other martyrs for science from the Renaissance era, Bruno remains an enigma, a living paradox, that still divides opinions.

Walking across Ponte Principe Amadeo bridge towards Vatican a thin layer of fog from Tiber below welcomes you into the fabled Roman night. It is a welcome of the most disorienting kind, suddenly reminding you of mankind’s tenuous grasp on time. Time not of the grand cosmological scale but time as it merely pertains to human civilization. Western civilization, even. Of which this city has seen all. Grand architectural edifices, wretched cruelty, sublime artistic achievements, obscene excesses, perfect dreams of salvation and transcendence, nightmarish oppression in their name … a living organism where the forces of contradictions sustain the body while tearing itself apart.

Dazed, under the spell, you walk back towards Centro Storico. Now Largo di Torre Argentina with the backdrop of bluish lights from stores and trams look like a gigantic frame in the process of being painted by Caravaggio.  You expect blood covered legionaries to get down from one of those trams. Bernini to step out of the tiny artisanal gelateria holding a cone of caffè e tabacco flavored gelato, bumping into Pasolini busy discussing with a fisherman the potential of Villa Borghese as a setting for a political demonstration as a cinematic act.

You sense the silence all around you. You see her join the column of dancing girls on their way to the temple of Fortuna, and his magical little hands holding on to yours as his eyes light up at the sight of the magnificent chariots…