The albatrosses’ arrival in the South-Western Halls transforms an astonishing sight into a sustained act of care: Piranesi welcomes a solitary bird, recognizes that a pair has come to nest, and supplies the materials that help them raise a chick. The episode, which gives its name to the year in which it occurs, makes the House’s teeming life visible through Piranesi’s attention to creatures The Other dismisses as part of a dead, monotonous ruin.

First Sighting

Piranesi first sees the bird while gathering cold, wet seaweed in a hall swept by wind. A vast white shape hangs above the grey waves, at first resembling a shining cross. As it glides closer, he realizes it is a bird far larger than any he has known. He spreads his arms towards it and tries to welcome it, but the wind steals his breath; the only words he can manage are an urgent invitation to come.

The albatross crosses the heaving water without beating its wings, then angles itself skilfully through a doorway whose width its wingspan exceeds. Once inside, it spreads its wings and stretches its throat towards the ceiling, making a clacking, whirring sound that Piranesi takes for a greeting. Dark backs marked with white stars distinguish this first bird. It walks across the pavement on greyish-pink feet, slapping audibly, and periodically approaches to watch Piranesi at work.

The Pair and Their Nest

When Piranesi returns the next day, the first bird has climbed the staircase to the Forty-Third Vestibule, and a second albatross has joined it. He imagines them as husband and wife but acknowledges that he cannot determine their sexes. Their markings differ: the second bird’s wings bear white flecks like silver rain. The pair spread their wings, dance around each other, point their beaks towards the ceiling, shriek and screech, and tap their long pink beaks together.

A few days later, the birds seem subdued. The star-marked albatross repeatedly gathers wet seaweed from the Lower Halls and heaps it in different places, apparently unable to settle on a suitable nest site. Piranesi understands the difficulty: cold, wet seaweed will not make a dry, comfortable nest for an egg. When he offers to help, the bird responds with its familiar wing-spread and clacking call, which Piranesi reads as enthusiasm.

Piranesi prepares a fishing net lined with heavy-gauge plastic and fills it with dry seaweed. The quantity is substantial—approximately three days’ fuel—and giving it away may leave him colder. He nevertheless weighs that cost against the prospect of a new albatross in the World. He adds clean white feathers he had kept because he liked them, and a hole-ridden woollen jumper that can serve as lining for the egg. At the Forty-Third Vestibule, the star-marked bird immediately investigates the supply, taking up beakfuls of dry seaweed and trying them in different places.

New Life in the House

The albatrosses build a tall nest approximately a metre wide at its base and lay an egg. Piranesi describes them as devoted parents: they care for the egg and, after it hatches, are equally diligent with their chick. The chick grows slowly and shows no sign of being ready to fledge. The episode therefore does not end with the spectacle of arrival; it follows the birds into the patient, ongoing work of raising their young.

Piranesi names the year for the albatross’s arrival in the South-Western Halls. Naming gives this encounter a place in his account of the House, turning a striking visit into a landmark in the passage of his life there. The supplied account records the chick still growing, rather than a completed departure, so the birds’ presence remains an unfolding part of the world he inhabits.

Meaning and Contrast

For Piranesi, the birds belong to a House alive with distinct forms of life. He resists The Other’s description of it as endless dreary rooms filled with decaying figures and bird droppings. The Lower Halls contain sea creatures and vegetation; the Middle Halls hold birds and people; even the droppings The Other deplores are, to Piranesi, signs of life. The halls differ in their architecture, openings, and unique statues. The albatrosses make that abundance concrete: they travel through the halls, establish a nest, and become parents within them.

That response accords with Piranesi’s broader reverence for the House, whose beauty he regards as immeasurable and whose kindness as infinite. It also resonates with Laurence Arne-Sayles’s account of an older way of relating to the world, in which the world and its inhabitants are not merely mute objects but participants in a meaningful exchange. The episode does not prove a theory of the House; it shows how Piranesi meets its creatures—with attention, welcome, and material generosity. Against The Other’s reduction of the halls to interchangeable rooms, the birds’ particular markings, calls, courtship, nesting, and care for their chick disclose a world of difference and continuing life.