Palace of the Holy Office

The Palace of the Holy Office is Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli’s pre-conclave residence and the point of contrast for his abrupt move into the election’s enforced austerity. Its four-hundred-square-metre apartment, with room for a grand piano, represents the spacious private life he must exchange for a small, window-sealed room and the isolation imposed on the cardinals.

Residence and Departure

Shortly before two in the morning, Lomeli leaves his apartment in the Palace of the Holy Office and hurries through the darkened cloisters of the Vatican toward the Pope’s bedroom. His prayer on the way turns the departure into an act of imagined substitution: he asks that the Pope be spared and that he himself be taken instead. The journey ends in the quiet Piazza Santa Marta, where an ambulance waiting apart from the buildings makes him realize that it has come not to carry a sick man to hospital but to remove a body.

Contrast with the Conclave Quarters

After the cardinals are sequestered, Lomeli enters a room halfway along a corridor and finds that it has no sitting room: only plain white walls, a polished parquet floor, and an iron bedstead. Against his former apartment’s four hundred square metres and grand piano, the room’s spareness feels like an imposed reminder of a simpler life. He thinks that this reduction may do him good, making the Palace a remembered measure of comfort rather than a place he can return to during the election.

Spatial Separation and Narrative Significance

The change of residence also marks a loss of orientation and access. The new room’s shutters, like those throughout the building, have been sealed; televisions and radios have been removed so that no outside person or news can influence the cardinals’ meditation. Unable even to discover whether his window would face St Peter’s or the city, Lomeli recognizes that he has already lost his bearings. The Palace of the Holy Office therefore stands on the other side of the conclave’s threshold: spacious and familiar, but now left behind as the election confines him to a deliberately restricted world.