I crossed the Tiber—put a bridge, a river, a world between me and the problems of the Vatican. I wished I could take out my sketchbook to draw, but all that rain would’ve ruined my paper. I would’ve liked to draw the world around me perfect: those columns unbroken, that doorway unsagging, that beggar’s hand declawed, that child’s nose whole once again. I came upon a hunk of a building: large, round, shadowy, story after story of crumbling arches. Wait, was that . . . ? Yes. The Colosseum. It was larger than I expected, even though only the top two stories of arches were visible above the centuries of dirt and debris. The marble’s stripped away and looted, but the structure still has a feeling of grandeur, doesn’t it? A feeling that only comes with hundreds of years of history: lion hunts and Gladiator games and martyred Christians. Now that I could duck under arches to protect my paper from the rain, I took out my sketchbook. I’ve told you how focused I get when I’m drawing, haven’t I? This was one of those moments when my sketching pulled me deeper and deeper into my own head and into the Colosseum. Then came a distant echo of monks chanting. I found out later that a near-extinct sect of monks lives in those ruins, but at the time, I believed it was the ghosts of martyred saints. I might’ve settled down in a corner and slept there for the night, except some vagabond jumped out of the shadows, and when he didn’t find any coin in my pockets, he held me down and stole my shoes—my shoes!—and my sketchbook. After that, I decided to return to the Vatican; surely the guards wouldn’t make me sleep out in the rain.

The problem? I had no idea where to find it. It was cold. The rain was coming down, and I didn’t want to think about what was in the mud I was sloshing through in bare feet. The people sleeping in the streets howled and barked like animals, and shadows (bone black, charcoal, carbon, soot, slate, fog, flint, ash) cloaked alleys and overhangs. I felt as disquieted as when a plague sweeps up your street, and yet, paradoxically, the picture that kept coming to mind that night was Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation.