Rome

Rome enters the narrative less as a present-day setting than as a place held in memory: vivid with sacred art and grand interiors, yet uncertain in its particulars. Its scenes of looking and remembering contrast with the televised spectacle unfolding before Diane Lucas and Max Stenner, while passing references to Rome alongside other possible destinations show how easily place can blur in conversation.

A remembered city of art

Diane recalls Rome through its churches and palazzos, where images of Jesus appear across walls and ceilings. She urges Max to remember a particular palazzo filled with enormous paintings, furniture, statues, and arched ceilings covered in murals. The recollection is expansive in visual detail but incomplete in geography: neither Diane nor Max can immediately supply the palazzo’s name.

The visit carries a small disagreement about how to encounter the city. Diane had tried to get them into a guided tour, but Max disliked the idea of a guide. In her memory, the galleries remain compelling without that structure: tourists move slowly from room to room, and visitors wearing headsets stand still, gazing up at painted angels, saints, and Jesus on the ceiling. Rome is thus remembered through both the scale of its art and the suspended attention it commands.

Memory without exact coordinates

Diane asks Max which palazzo they visited and how many years earlier the trip took place, but the exchange does not settle either detail. Max sips his drink and nods slightly as she reconstructs the galleries. The scene makes Rome intensely imaginable while leaving its itinerary indistinct; the city’s remembered name and images arrive more readily than the facts needed to locate them precisely.

Rome also appears as one possibility among several when the occupants of two empty chairs are discussed. They are described as an older married couple, more or less, who may be returning from Paris, Rome, or north-central Chile. No destination is confirmed. The list makes Rome part of a conversational field of guesses rather than a securely established point on the story’s map.

Rome and the present moment

The Rome recollection unfolds while Diane, Max, and Martin Dekker sit before a television on Super Bowl LVI. The contrast is between a remembered encounter with monumental paintings and a present organized around a broadcast, its crowd, and the game’s ritual rhythms. Rome is not shown directly; Diane’s description and the imagined tourists looking upward give the absent city its shape within the room.

Later, Rome is again proposed as a recent destination, but Tessa Berens corrects the assumption: she and her companion have returned from Paris. The correction reinforces the entry’s pattern of unstable place-names. Rome remains a powerful image in Diane’s account, yet in the characters’ present conversation it can also be mistaken for somewhere else.