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i’m so tired, i think i’m numb. but i am here to announce:
it’s done. my paper is fucking done.
it’s been a long time coming. like two and a half years. i finished my internship in february of 2020, and this was the last thing. grad school, i bid you adieu!
well, technically i have a presentation to give wednesday that i have not started before grad school is totally over, but that’s small potatoes.
Caravaggio's Rome is My Rome the book I've been writing for the past 20 years
When I first moved to Italy in 2003 I began researching, writing, taking photographs, collecting recipes, stories, experiences; I began gathering together the material that would become The Book, My Book
The book, my book began its life as "Under a Fig Tree in Rome", my love letter to the five years I lived on the streets, named after my first home, a fig tree on the Tiber Island.
In first-person narrative I told the tales that weaved together those five years. A way of apologising, forgiving, celebrating, remembering those faces & places. An exorcism of ghosts of sorts as most of the characters i wrote about are dead now. My book is a memorial. A glorification of the inglorious. But it was no Kerouac. I printed and bound "Fig Tree" and placed it in my bookcase.
My obsession with Rome remained a roaring fire in my heart after i left the city in the summer of 2007. By 2009 I enrolled in the history of art program at Birkbeck, University of London, graduating with a Masters degree in 2017, the majority of my credits being Roman/ Renaissance modules. I had learnt a great deal which made me aware that I knew absolutely nothing.
In 2016 I began writing about Rome again, but from a different angle. My boyfriend had a rickshaw which he used to transport tourists around the city. I realised the rione of Rome I had lived in & written about in The Book, My Book was also the backdrop of Michael Merisi da Caravaggio's twelve years in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century.
I began to draw different lines on the same map, joining dots, making connections. I wrote another book, based on a series of walks in which you saw the paintings of Caravaggio as well as where he lived, where he drank, where he worked overlayed with where I lived, where I drank, where (and what) I wrote. Caravaggio's Rome is My Rome.
The lockdowns of 2020-21 changed everything for Francesco & I. No tourists, no work. Required by law to stay at home, 25 km east of Piazza Navona, I began to explore my patch the city, Giardinetti, just off exit 18 of the Grande Raccordo Anullare, the ring road around Rome. My geography had changed. & then our circumstances changed too.
In December 2022 Francesco had a car accident that left him semi-paralysed. From the moment he was discharged from hospital in February of this year I became a cook, cleaner & carer. My Rome work became a Mrs Beaton-like grimoire of recipes, household management tips, hedgewitchery and notes on a nightmare commute - with a wheelchair - across the city relying on (extremely unreliable) public transport.
My role changed, so my Rome changed and the book, my book gets re-written, again. More like a Cy Twombley painting than ever - scribble, scribble, scribble, WORD IN CAPITAL LETTERS, whitened, sanded back, text comes through the titanium white.
Been a while since I was personally active on this account, but I just got accepted into a Master’s at a new university. The title is Master of Writing and Editing for Publication, and I’m so excited to get into it again. This one seems more geared towards career outcomes, so I’m definitely excited. Will see how I manage though, given the burn out and anxieties that interrupted my last attempt at Master’s, (not to mentioned the added joy of covid).
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