My father used to keep a copy in his studio, so it was one of the first paintings I tried to visit upon arriving in Florence, but it’s locked away in San Marco for only the pious to ponder. However, as my mother always said, persistence pays, so I convinced a young friar to allow me entry one evening during vespers. As the friars held services in an upstairs chapel, I snuck through the courtyard. The friars’ prayers had the same eerie rhythm as the incantations of Fra Savonarola—mi dispiace. I won’t say that name again. I promise. That was the church where “the madman friar” had lived, taught, preached. I closed up my ears and kept going; that’s how badly I wanted to see that painting.

Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation hangs at the top of a staircase. The colors are so bright that it gives off an ethereal light even in darkness. I sat down to copy the angel Gabriel’s exquisite multicolored wings and the Virgin Mary’s delicate features. A slender column divides the two figures, each standing under their own graceful arch, the divine and earthly in the same painting, yet divided. To this day, it’s one of the most beautiful paintings I’ve ever seen, and it always made me wonder: how could that madman friar spread such brutality when he’d lived among such beauty?

That question is why Fra Angelico’s painting trailed me through Rome that night: how could a city sprouted from such beauty devolve into such ugliness, and if such a great Empire can fall so, what hope do we mere mortals have?

I’d been walking through Rome for Mary-knows-how-long when I heard a huff behind me. Was someone following me? Felice della Rovere perhaps? I walked faster, my bare feet slipping in the mud. I ducked down a small street, an alley, another street. Hanging corpse, hanging laundry, dead dog. Behind me, feet splashed through puddles. I looked back: too short and too many legs to be human. Animals. Madre Maria, how many of them were there? Five? Six? The huffs grew to growls. Across a piazza, I spotted a low dome atop a round building. It had to be a church. One bark, then another. I looked back again: pointed ears, scruffy necks, bushy tails, eyes yellow as yolk. Wolves. I took the stairs two at a time. Their claws clattered up the marble steps behind me, and as I lurched for the church door . . .

You’re expecting me to find easy sanctuary, aren’t you? You imagine me yanking open that door, slipping through a crack and slamming it shut on their chomping jowls just in time, don’t you? Why does everyone think my life comes so easily? Let me ask you this: how many churches do you know that leave doors unlocked all night, especially in a city full of vagrants?