Come to Light by Paul Madonna

Author:Paul Madonna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the hallway are rows of photographs: Sofia with a young boy. He’s five, six, at the beach; on a carousel; in Florence at the Loggia dei Lanzi—the square where I recently fell in love with drawing sculpture. I’m thinking this must be her son. I remember hearing talk of Sofia’s child at the party. I was drunk, it was loud, and the conversation was in broken English, but I also recall something about a scandal.

Following the line of photographs I see the boy grow from an adolescent to a teen. In every one, Sofia is beaming; the boy wears varied expressions. Then a shot of the boy with Anna. Looks recent. He’s a young man. They’re both dressed as pirates, both laughing hysterically.

In a second dining area, not as large as the main room where the parties are held, but still enormous, I come upon a woman dusting. She’s young, early twenties, dark hair. “Buongiorno,” I say. She smiles and continues her work. This room is more formal, with a long oak table that can easily seat twenty, Victorian cabinets, antique vases, and a Persian rug larger than I thought was possible to weave. The walls are adorned with paintings hung more like your typical gallery, all at the same center height, with space between to breathe. If I didn’t know any better, I might think I was touring a seventeenth-century château. Then I realize the paintings are all of the same subject: a large rectangular piazza with a fountain at one end and tall obelisk at the other. In several, the piazza is depicted full of water. All are mounted in heavy, overly gilded frames, and one, in a twelve-sided oval, has a small plaque attached that reads: The Flooding of Piazza Navona 1652. Well, no shit. Navona is one of the larger, more famous piazzas in Rome. It’s not where Sofia and I met—meaning it’s not the piazza she was flooding—but I hardly think that’s an argument against saying these paintings and her vandalistic tendencies are linked.

“Scusa,” I say the young woman who’s dusting. “Can you tell me about these?”

She comes over. “You want to know about these paintings?”

“I do. They’re all of the Piazza Navona. Was there a flood there in the 1600s?”

She laughs. “Of a sort. In 1651, the sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X, Donna Olimpia Pamphilj, had a palace overlooking the piazza. There was a popular market there, but she did not like it. She was a very powerful woman who liked to throw big parties, so she had the market relocated and turned the piazza into a setting for aristocratic carriage rides. Every August she would flood the square using the water from its three fountains.” She steps over to one of the paintings that shows the piazza flooded like a big puddle. “If you look,” she says, “you can see how, at the time, the piazza was shaped like a bowl. Olimpia would plug the drains of the fountains in order to flood the square.

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