Rome

Rome is both Lorenzo Quart’s home and the command center from which he is sent to investigate the crisis surrounding Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas in Seville. The city frames the mission at both ends: Quart receives his orders beneath the rain at the Apostolic Palace, travels south as an agent expected to gather facts without provoking scandal, and returns to Rome with a report that cannot contain the human truths he has encountered. In that movement between Rome and Seville, the city becomes more than a setting; it is the institutional vantage point from which a local church’s precarious existence is reduced to information, jurisdiction, and political risk.

The city as Quart’s home

Rome is where Quart has built his adult life and professional identity. Nearly twelve years before the Seville mission, he arrived as a student at the Gregorian University. He was drawn to the Greco, a centuries-old café whose history and unhurried atmosphere suited his habit of reading. By the time the novel’s investigation begins, the IOE rents him an attic at 119 Via del Babuino, with a small terrace looking toward Trinità dei Monti and the Spanish Steps. At the Greco he regularly reads beneath a bust of Victor Emmanuel II, at a table associated with Giacomo Casanova and Ludwig of Bavaria. These details give Rome the texture of an inhabited personal world, not merely a headquarters: Quart’s routines and tastes are rooted in its cafés, streets, and familiar views.

His attachment to the city coexists with the disciplined, mobile career that Rome made possible. Quart entered the Church’s operational service after years of formation: six years in seminary, two years studying philosophy, Church history, and theology, a scholarship in Rome for a doctorate in canon law, and further training in diplomacy and Church-state relations. He then served in European nunciatures before Paolo Spada recruited him to the Institute for External Works shortly before his twenty-ninth birthday. Rome is therefore both the setting of his education and the center from which his expertise is deployed. The black leather travel book in which he records assignments across Central Europe, Ibero-America, and the former Yugoslavia turns his life into a continuing itinerary issued by Roman superiors.

The mission begins in rain

In early May, a rain front hangs over St Peter’s Square when Quart receives the order that will take him to Seville. He approaches the Bronze Door beneath Bernini’s colonnade, where a Swiss Guard in the Renaissance-striped uniform prepares to identify him. Quart’s immaculate dark suit, Roman-collared black silk shirt, and handmade black shoes distinguish him from the guard’s uniform, establishing the contrast between the polished operative and the ceremonial institution through which he must pass. Inside the Apostolic Palace, he crosses guarded courtyards and stairways to the office of the Institute for External Works, carefully wiping rain from his face and shoes before entering. His passage is a literal movement through layers of Church security toward the office where the local crisis is to be converted into an assignment.

The authority behind that assignment is divided and cautious. The archbishop who directs the IOE tells Quart that the matter has been entrusted to the institute for the time being; only if the investigation reveals serious indications will it be transferred to the Church’s official inquisitorial arm. Quart is to spend several days in Seville, identify the author of a letter, maintain prudent contact with local ecclesiastical authorities, and keep the inquiry discreet and reasonable. Another senior churchman favors intervention by the Holy Office “in the old style,” a remark that places the investigation in the shadow of more coercive institutional possibilities. The order is thus not simply to discover what happened, but to establish what Rome may safely do with what is discovered.

Information and internal politics

Rome’s interest in the case is sharpened by a message from Vísperas, the hacker who has drawn the Pope’s attention to the Seville church. The IOE director acknowledges that the hacking itself would ordinarily be a minor matter, and that responsibility for a parish priest and his diocese would normally belong to the Archbishop of Seville. But the Pope’s interest creates a larger stage for internal conflict. The director chose Quart because he is his best agent, yet he also wants a substantial report that demonstrates the institute is active, satisfies the Pope, and helps keep Cardinal Jerzy Iwaszkiewicz in check. The investigation serves the Church’s need to understand the case and the competing needs of officials seeking position within Rome’s hierarchy.

Quart’s instructions repeatedly mark the limits of his authority. His mission is informational, not to decide the parish’s fate. He must maintain exceptional neutrality, avoid publicity, and send Rome material from which concrete action can later be chosen. A senior official cautions that public truth does not always make people free. In Seville, Quart learns why the distinction matters: the church’s old privilege requires a Thursday Mass for Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija, and the arrangement complicates its secularization and proposed demolition. The archdiocese and Banco Cartujano have their own interests in the redevelopment, while the parish priest and his supporters resist its loss. Rome’s remote scrutiny encounters a conflict in which Church jurisdiction, inherited conditions, local custom, and property interests do not neatly align.

Seville viewed from Rome

Quart’s investigation brings him into contact with the people and circumstances that the Roman offices initially treat as a dossier. He considers the two deaths at the church lamentable accidents consistent with the police account, and sees the parish priest’s resistance as a private struggle supported by some parishioners. He also continues to investigate the hacker’s identity and the unexplained postcard and biblical citation associated with Carlota Bruner. The questions overlap, but they are not interchangeable: the identity of Vísperas matters to Rome’s immediate inquiry, while the church’s threatened existence and the histories held within it give the investigation its human and moral weight.

The distinction becomes explicit when Quart explains that Vísperas may have sent the message to attract Rome’s attention and help Father Ferro preserve his church. Quart suspects that the hacker believes an appeal to the Pope will make the truth visible, whereas Rome may be interested in a different kind of truth: information suitable for official use. He recognizes that the people in Seville have offered him mysteries rather than straightforward assistance, but he also sees that their silences arise within a struggle whose stakes cannot be captured by the narrow question of the hacker’s identity. The distance between Rome and the parish is not only geographical. It is a difference between what an institution asks to know and what a local community needs remembered.

At the end of the Seville inquiry, Quart tells Archbishop Aquilino Corvo that his task was to report, not to resolve the dispute. He says the hacker’s identity will eventually become known, but that the more consequential matters are Father Ferro’s position and the future of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. His report is intended to let Rome make decisions with knowledge of the situation. Corvo responds that he will communicate his own account widely—to Quart’s superiors, the Vatican’s representative, and others—turning the return of information into another contest over who may define the case. As Quart leaves the archbishop’s palace, the Giralda appears beyond a courtyard once used to imprison disobedient Seville priests. He imagines that in an earlier age he and Ferro might have exchanged views in that prison while Corvo’s version traveled slowly to Rome. The thought sets modern communications against the old machinery of discipline, without implying that faster messages have removed institutional conflict.

Return and institutional consequence

A few days after returning to Rome and submitting his report, Quart stands at the open terrace windows of his Via del Babuino home as rain falls over the ochre walls, rooftops, and Spanish Steps. The scene recalls the rain on the day he received his orders, closing the mission’s Roman frame. Paolo Spada arrives and tells him that the Pope has received the report. The outcome is not a declaration that Quart has solved the church’s crisis, but an assessment of his service within the institute’s internal politics.

Spada explains that Iwaszkiewicz had wanted to send Quart into an obscure administrative post. Spada used Quart’s record—including his work in Panama and the rescue of a Croatian bishop from Sarajevo—to argue for his continued operational role. Iwaszkiewicz accepted Quart’s formal execution as an agent of the IOE, and Spada describes the result as a draw in their institutional contest. Rome thus receives Quart back as both investigator and piece in a larger game of influence. The city’s decisive significance lies in this double role: it gives him formation, home, and professional purpose, while its offices determine which parts of the Seville story can become actionable knowledge and which remain outside the official account.