The Vatican Gardens offer Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli a brief counterpoint to the conclave’s confinement: a place where he can seek silence and look beyond the walls, even as security measures reveal how little freedom the future Pope will retain. Their paths and lawns make the city visible but not accessible, turning the gardens into both refuge and reminder of the office’s imprisonment.

Setting and Access

During the conclave, the gardens lie within a Vatican largely emptied of its ordinary activity. The surrounding area has been cleared; security men watch from among the trees, and a patrol checks flower beds for bombs. Lomeli reaches this controlled landscape on foot, followed by his bodyguard. The gardens remain open enough for him to walk, but not beyond surveillance: radio chatter interrupts his meditation, and a guard briefly ducks behind a statue of Apollo in a clumsy attempt to conceal himself.

A Place for Reflection

After a day of voting, Lomeli rides back to the hostel in silence, his cheek against the cold bus window. The tyres swish over wet cobbles as the bus passes through successive courtyards; above the gardens, a passenger jet descends towards Fiumicino airport. The contrast between the enclosed Vatican and the departing or arriving world beyond it accompanies his resolve to walk to the Sistine Chapel the next morning, rain or shine. He recognizes that airless seclusion is not merely unhealthy but obstructs spiritual reflection.

The gardens later give that intention physical form. On a whim, Lomeli leaves the road, climbs steps past a fountain, and crosses a damp lawn, lifting his cassock’s hem to keep it from the wet grass. From there he sees the low hills of Rome under pale November light. The quiet is not complete—security radio static soon breaks into it—but the brief pause lets him consider the life awaiting whoever is elected.

Confinement and Significance

The view across the trees sharpens Lomeli’s fear of the papacy. The elected Pope, he reflects, will not be able to wander through Rome, browse in a bookshop, or sit outside a café; he will remain a prisoner within the Vatican. Even Benedict XVI, after resigning, could not escape that confinement and ended his days in a converted convent in the gardens, a ghostly presence. Lomeli prays to be spared the same fate.

The gardens therefore hold a double meaning. Their lawns, fountain, and distant view offer a momentary release from the hostel, yet their security perimeter makes plain that this is no ordinary freedom. They allow Lomeli to imagine the city while confronting the boundaries imposed by the office he hopes not to inherit. That tension—between open landscape and enclosed life—makes the gardens a setting for his uneasy meditation on election, vocation, and loss of liberty.