The hotel lobby casts itself into antiquity, or tries to. It cinches the curtains--bound at the waist, Sharon Olds pricks my ear--with heavy tassels, hangs a fake Rembrandt-style on the wall, a girl with blunt bangs watching over her sleeping brother and us, gilded mirrors reflecting a stone, purposefully warn bust. They try to snap their lobby into place beside the history of their country, a wash of dull orange, beige. Beneath a fake marble table, red splinters into blue, pink, and green. Two birds puffed with the colors of the wild scream at each other from within their cage.
Outside the Duomo, a girl splits a path between cameras and backpacks with her bike. She is of another time, poised on the seat, hands curled around the bars, pixie cut, flowered skirt, and knee-high socks. Leading the way, a basket stuffed with six rolls of toilet paper.
At dinner, sitting on a porch overlooking pillars and metal gates drawn down over closed stores, everything stained with teenage rebellion and reclaiming in the form of spray painted names and lions, I have just finished three courses of cheese, pasta, beef, and one glass of red, the remains spread across the tablecloth. A woman with hair that barely brushes her ears leads three preschool-aged children to us, each marching to a different melody, one skipping. They stop at the head of our table and lift dessert menus over their heads to the sound of our laughter.
I am taken by the Duomo's kaleidoscope skin, the way it erupts, pulling terracotta toward the sun. On the back, though, someone has branded the scaffolding with a stylized flamingo, peach and fuchsia feathers, throat, toes. He is origami, this foreign bird, his neck twisted to peer up a the church.
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