The 1958 papal conclave enters the novel through recollection rather than as a fully dramatized past event: Pope John XXIII’s diary records his election on the eleventh ballot, while Jacopo Lomeli remembers the conclave as a young seminarian. Together, these fragments make the election a measure of both the papacy’s solemn burden and the changing rituals of the Church.

John XXIII’s account of election

In a diary entry dated 28 October 1958, Pope John XXIII recalls having avoided eating with the cardinals and taken his meal alone in his room. He was elected on the eleventh ballot. The election felt dreamlike, he writes, yet was also the most solemn reality of his life; he answered it with a prayer for mercy and readiness to live and die with Jesus.

His recollection also registers the distance between the newly elected Pope and the crowd greeting him. About three hundred thousand people applauded from below, but the arc-lights allowed him to see only a shapeless mass. Election brought public acclamation, yet his account emphasizes the inward gravity and isolation of the office rather than triumph.

Lomeli’s memories of the conclaves

As the Sistine Chapel is prepared for a later conclave, Lomeli remembers following the elections of 1958 and 1963 in newspaper illustrations while he was still a seminarian in Genoa. He recalls cardinals seated in canopied thrones around the chapel during voting. Once an election was concluded, the cardinals lowered their canopies, leaving the elected man distinguished from his former equals.

The practice gives Lomeli a vivid image of the change election produces: one moment the cardinals sit together, and the next the others approach the chosen man in deference. He also remembers that Angelo Roncalli had not expected to become a cardinal, much less Pope, while Giovanni Battista Montini’s election was accompanied by a shouting match in the chapel. These recollections make the conclave’s outcome seem capable of overturning expectation and intensifying existing divisions.

Changing customs and the present election

The canopied thrones had been abandoned in 1965, after the Second Vatican Council. Lomeli understands their disappearance as part of the wider retreat from older Church traditions, in a College of Cardinals now regarded as too large and multinational for Renaissance ceremony. Yet he retains an affection for that pageantry. His private reservations about the late Pope’s repeated emphasis on simplicity and humility complicate any easy opposition between old display and new restraint: Lomeli considers excessive simplicity capable of becoming its own form of ostentation.

These memories surface while Lomeli supervises preparations in the Sistine Chapel, where modern security precautions and the practical work of setting up for the election replace the old ceremonial arrangement. The remembered conclaves thus become more than historical background. They reveal the tension between ritual and reform that shapes Lomeli’s outlook as he takes responsibility for a new election, and place the personal loneliness of John XXIII’s account alongside the institutional spectacle of the papacy.