By night, Rome changes its face, it turns into discreet fires and long shadows. Details disappear. Faded is the light of day that sharpens edges and opens streets like a territory to be discovered, so many images to be absorbed. By night, Rome puts on a chasuble, the long veil of a Madonna in mourning. The vault of the sky descends upon the earth, streetlamps are like fireflies winking in the night. The eyes seek out what they must find, but all is not given, the city is like a body slowly revealing itself, we discover it like a blind man’s caress, in slow steps. The sweep of a hand, laughter, languor, Rome takes on new life as I watch, my eyes comforted by darkness, a gentle night. I am troubled by everything daylight hid from me. Wound in black, the city seems to become what it was in antiquity, stories run down the alleys, enter through secret doors, slip down well concealed tunnels, ghosts begin to breathe again. The city becomes the place where Dante’s errant souls wait, who have asked nothing from God or anyone else, the place where present and past are married.

When the pain gets too intense, I try the therapy of exhaustion. I walk for hours through the Centro Storico, through Trastevere, the old Jewish ghetto, I lose myself in the old streets. I keep returning to Via dei Coronari, I dream of buying things I can’t possibly afford from the shop windows on Via del Babuino, I order a coffee on the Piazza del Popolo and share my croissant with a very cheeky sparrow that has landed on my table. Often I move through the streets blindly. I let my steps carry me forward, moved by people who brush by me, the cloak of the sun wraps around my body. Then, some unknown signal awakens me, I come back to reality and lift my eyes to look.

Sometimes, when beauty strikes, I don’t know how to take it in. It is heavy and dense, it takes up all the space, and I understand why tourists put a lens between the world and the gaze they cast upon it. They want to protect themselves. Beauty can be intolerable, it can turn the world into an impossible place, because if you lose it after you’ve found it, what remains?

During these long walks, I try to escape myself. Walk, more and more, faster and further, like centrifugal-force machines that scientists use to separate wheat from chaff. I leave behind the four walls of my mind and surrender to the city’s heat. I am in an open-air monastery, and I pray to be given the faith I need to cross the desert.

Drink a glass of Prosecco. Meet a very thin and very tall Dutchman who drags me through the churches of Rome at night to see the Caravaggios that you can view if you slip some coins in a slot, tease him by asking if he’s the Flying Dutchman. Spend hours on St. Peter’s Square looking at the crowd, the police with their ears fastened to their cellphones, the priests walking with a regal gait, lovers entwined. Walk along the banks of the Tiber. Gaze at the city from the Pincio Gardens. Try to roll my r’s without getting it right. Eat a plate of carbonara with plenty of black pepper. Pull off the leaves of fried artichokes. Go to Arsenale and fall in love with an anthracite silk dress. Listen to the Dutch guide tell me about the Pope and Mussolini. Eat a raspberry-and-chocolate-flavoured gelato. Write on the rooftop deck until late in the evening. Watch Rome, the series, then fall asleep and dream that I’m caressing Titus Pullo. Get woken up by the traffic at six in the morning. Write on the deck before it gets too hot. Wave to the owner who never leaves her place except to do the shopping and hang her clothes out to dry. Go down six floors without an elevator. Wait for the pleasure of taking a shower at the end of the day. Go out in the burning heat. Read Ovid’s The Art of Love. Think about you and try not to anymore, and if I don’t succeed, take off running. Walk down Borgo Pio and pretend not to look like a tourist. Scream silently because I have been taken prisoner by a crowd moving like a tide of mud through the Vatican museums. Order an iced cappuccino at Castroni’s as consolation. Buy a jean skirt for five euros in the street from a Pakistani vendor, and spot him again when I go by late that evening as he’s packing up his wares and folding up his tent, tables, and boxes and stowing them in the back of a white truck. Wake up, make coffee, spread Nutella on some whole-wheat crackers, eat an extremely juicy peach. Splash myself with water from a public fountain. Regret not being able to make love. Cry on St. Peter’s Square, hoping no one will see me, and hoping that someone will.

When I feel my mind turning to you, I grab it by the neck and push it over to the window so it can see the dome against the sky behind the buildings and the tall umbrella pines. My eyes settle on the orange glow of the apartment block across the way. The shutters are open, and I see a young family getting ready for dinner. Their neighbour, an old woman, steps out to see whether the heat has fallen and it’s safe for her to go out. I lean out the window and six floors down I see cars and people moving slowly through the heat of Via Candia. I return to the deck and the forest of TV antennas that look like a contemporary art installation. I sit down and listen to the noise that plates make in the building’s inner courtyard, then go on writing.

In the opening of a metal pipe, a bee is building its house. Every morning, as I watch from the table, it makes countless trips between the flowers and the pipe. I see it cross the deck, gather a load, and return with its feet heavy with yellow moss that I imagine it will push into the pipe to build its nest. If I get in its way, it politely flies around me and continues its work. I would like to be an ant and slip into the pipe to see what is going on there. I would like to be another bee so this one would hold me in its embrace and rock me to sleep.

You made your nest in me. You opened your bags, and out jumped snakes and cockroaches, mermaids, jellyfish, a dragon, and a firebird, the hell of the Garden of Earthly Delights. Little by little, they took up residence. At night they moved through the house, they made themselves at home. Sometimes, in the morning, they would lie low, dispersed by dawn light. Then they would come creeping back, emboldened by nightfall. They recovered their lost ground, moving forward stealthily, pitilessly occupying the territory.

I was the house you inhabited. I knew every inch of it except the narrow space you occupied, that dark room with the windows bolted shut where you crouched, head lowered, knees against your chest like a child who’s been punished. That casket where you lay so alone, I stood before it hoping one day that the cover would open and like Lazarus or Raskolnikov, you would resuscitate or, finally, that you might be born.

You told me the story of a soldier who returned to Leningrad, from the front. On the way back home, he saw corpses, dead bodies on the ground, the victims of hunger, horses that had been put out of their misery, looted farms. In front of his house, his wife was waiting. She was well dressed, her hair freshly coiffed, her lips reddened. She spotted him and rushed to his side, gathered him in her arms, covered his face with kisses, and promised she would never let him out of her sight. He was dirty, thin, he smelled bad. She didn’t notice that something in his eyes had changed.

The soldier dropped his pack on the ground and looked around. She took his hand and led him into the kitchen. She had set the table. A chicken, potatoes, beets, cabbage—she had made a feast for him. He stared and said nothing. Then a veil of deep misery fell across his face like a mask. His wife was invisible to him. Ill at ease, she asked him, “What’s wrong?”

There were no words for the look in his eyes. He didn’t understand where she had found all this life, whom she had taken it from, and what she had traded to get it. He picked up his gun and aimed at her. He fired once twice three times until the house was empty, just like him.

You lived in a dark room in the middle of an abandoned house where ghosts swept past, beings that had not been freed by those they had left. In this place, torment buzzed, it was a house built on a torrent. You lived alone in the dark room I could not enter. I called to you from where I stood, a space that was neither your dwelling nor mine, a kind of decompression chamber, the departure lounge of an airport, the waiting room in a medical clinic. I answered your calls and your demands. I kept the tension in the line that bound us. I refused to leave the garden and turn my back on you.

Each time my words came to knock on the door of that house, the dragon would rush out, ready to breathe fire and keep me from coming closer. Brambles began to grow against the walls, and moats were dug all around. You practised provocation. You flew into a rage because I would not obey the laws of your kingdom. Your words rattled like a hail of machine-gun fire, they tightened their ranks, their shields raised one next to the other in a square formation, like a fortress. I sought a way in, I set my syntax against yours, I would not resign and accept the unfair, senseless things you said. But your rage did not lessen. I pulled you near and you resisted until finally I retreated in exhaustion. Then it started over one more time, I left once again for the front. It was a strange reversal: I was the knight and you the damsel, prisoner of the tower, but when I reached the top, you refused to budge. Instead of following me, you preferred your own dreams as if they were reality.

Sometimes I would give in and retreat into myself and question my desire. I left the abandoned house. I let a forest of thorns grow over you. Only then would you venture out.

Rome is fragrant with flowering laurel, pink, white, and purple, the laurel of crowns. Between the Teatro Marcello and the Piazza Bocca della Verità, great clumps of laurel have taken over the sidewalk. I have to push through them to reach the banks of the Tiber and the bridge to Trastevere.

At the Borghese Gallery, standing before Bernini’s magnificent statue of a girl transformed into a laurel tree to escape the god who would rape her, I wonder which of us was Apollo, and which Daphne?

Julius Caesar accumulated mistresses, Mark Antony’s political manoeuvring dovetailed with his sexual desires, Augustus’s wife regularly brought him young virgins whom he took great pleasure in deflowering. I have known more than one Caesar in my time. Caesar the gladiator for whom girls were mere dolls. Caesar the bard for whom life was a percussion concert in a minefield. Caesar the poet who published under a pseudonym to hide the fact that he was a Narcissus desperately seeking his own reflection. Caesar the philosopher who acted as if he were above it all, but wrapped himself in his mother’s skirts, though she had humiliated him his whole life. How many times was I caught in their web, and had to slowly pull my feet free, fuming because I did not know how to untie the knots or dissolve their sticky juices, not knowing how to carry off a worthy coup d’état because I was no Brutus and I was alone, without a senate behind me?

Rome was built on blood and sperm. During my walks, I come across couples, sometimes on a bridge, other times in a park or standing by a wall in a shadowy street, couples locked in languorous kisses, couples quarrelling bitterly the way you see in the movies, voices raised and arms in the air, the girl stalking off, the boy left behind, then the girl coming back a minute later to add a few more choice words, waiting for a reaction before leaving again, the boy waiting, then running after her before she disappears for good, and a little further on I see them in each other’s arms, leaning against the rail, with the Colosseum or the Vatican in the background.

My friend Constantine often said that passion is a drug. The more you yell, the more you cry, the truer love seems. Adrenaline ramping up, the wild sessions in bed, as if in love tranquility were suspect, but not violence.

Constantine knows what he’s talking about. Wild women in a rage, narcissists with a thirst for power—he’s met a few in his life. According to him, the art world is fertile ground, bursting with girls with borderline personalities. They stream in from everywhere, throw themselves at his feet, tattoo his sheets with evidence of their visit. They want to hang onto him, either by becoming his muse, or showing him the real facts of life. But Constantine is no fool. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t always conquer, he returned with the assurance of gladiators and the stoicism of the ancients. Since then, he has been flying solo.

I tell myself that soon I’ll be doing the same, and opposing your invasion with the radical retreat of my armies. You will not see me anymore, you will not hear me, you won’t know where I am or what I am doing, imagining me will be your only choice.

The gladiators of ancient Rome were not what we picture today. They did not fight duels. One did not die of a fatal blow struck by the other. The loser had to acknowledge his defeat, his adversary’s superior strength, and his own weakness. Standing next to the victor, he lowered his eyes and awaited the emperor’s verdict— would he die or would his life be spared? The crowd took great pleasure in the scene. Such happiness in seeing the waiting man’s face, and the thrill of watching him have his throat cut.

When I visited the Colosseum, I learned that the Roman gladiator was a curious character. He was a star and an object of horror. He embodied the murderer and the victim both. When he died, he would join actors, prostitutes, and people who had taken their own lives out of cowardice. Gladiators could be loved only at a distance, in the arena. It was not good form to associate with them.

But for the Romans, there was a class worse than gladiators, for true danger was not to be found in the arena, but at the theatre where the most vile impulses and the true face of men were displayed for all to see.