As published in Flare: The Flagler Review, Spring 2025 issue.

Piazza Napoleone is ringed by sycamores.

A bicycle bounces past with a chihuahua perched in the front basket.

Under Corinthian-pillared arches, old couples lounge in their linens, sipping espressos.

From a window drifts the sound of someone playing the piano, slowly, forlornly.

Between lemon and tangerine houses rises the bell tower of San Michele in Foro and its adjoining church of dazzling white. The noon sun radiates from the marble flagstones, from the church’s blind arcades, from the high walls freckled with shrubs, so that all the piazza is humming with white heat. The church’s façade soars upward in four tiers of small loggias, each column uniquely, elaborately adorned. Lions, dragons and harpies crawl up one pillar, another is carved into twisting vines, another inlaid with black clover.

At the arched entrance a woman begs, her pleas a monotonous plainchant of buonasera signora, buanasera signore, grazie signora.

Inside, the exterior extravagance is muted to grey stone and plain columns. Beneath the altar, the corpse of San Davino Armeno is displayed in a glass case, wearing a red velvet cap, a faded blue silk gown and a richly embroidered cloak – his teeth are exposed in his shrivelled, blackened face, and he lifts his right hand in a gesture of benediction, his thumb and the tip of his middle finger missing.In a corner, the halos of Filippino Lippi’s saints are faded, St Helena’s ghostly veil draped over the cross she bears.

Back in the blinding white outside, someone zooms past on an electric scooter, their whole face and arm fat jiggling from the cobblestones.

A covered quadracycle rattles through the alleyway, the family peddling comically on their benches, the little son turning his fake steering wheel up front.

Three young men, one with his white shirt wrapped around his naked shoulders, all wearing big silver watches, designer sunglasses and long chinos, saunter like lions through the streets.

“Ciao, a domani!” a teenager calls to his friends, walking out of a bookshop on Via Roma. A few steps further a gelateria calls me in.

“Questa è questa,” says the ice cream man, pointing from a picture on the wall to the chocolate ice cream in the tub. I’ll have that one then. Bursts of subtle orange blend with the dark sweetness of the chocolate. A lick of fior di latte – aahh, a mouthful of fresh air!

I accidentally dive nose-first into the gelato, and it’s melting so fast, running everywhere, on my hands, my cheeks, dripping to the floor, covering everything in sweetness and I think for a moment how strange this life is with all this time everywhere, so many histories coexisting in the ever-passing present. How the Madonna and Child on the corner of San Michele’s brilliant façade, with their golden crowns and golden thunderbolts, were sculpted to celebrate the end of a 15^th century plague, how no one wears masks anymore. How new bicycles are, but how ancient desire. How in this same life there is a church carved from marble, inlaid with unicorns and centaurs, and just around the corner a boy steps out from the cool air of a bookstore, thinking of his homework and that Instagram photo of Bianca in her bikini. How San Davino, from his lonely, stagnant casket, may not be reaching out in blessing but in yearning, reaching across centuries for a taste of the divine, for a taste of fior di latte and cioccolato all’arancia.