Sandals, Cassocks and Rolexes.
I see her on the train that connects the airport to Rome, sitting right in front of me, on her way to the Pope’s funeral. She wears a habit the color of dry earth, rough, almost the same tone as the parched soil of farmlands. Her face, pale as a page forgotten in the sun, suggests she has only lived through the death of two popes. She is not old, but her bulging eyes, a dull brown like her habit, look at the world with the intensity of someone who has seen more than she has ever spoken.
It’s her hands that unsettle me. They don’t belong to a cloistered nun from a life of peace, but to a peasant who has torn hard roots barehanded, or to a galley prisoner. Her fingertips, disproportionate to her small palms, swell like knots in old wood. The veins rise in high relief, like dry paths etched on cracked earth.
And the sandals… made of esparto, so worn that only mental calculation allows me to imagine their story: handed down from one nun to another, and another, in a silent chain of poverty and endurance. They are not shoes; they are woven memory.
Normally, I wouldn’t let a chance like this slip away. I’m sure we have little in common, and precisely because of that the conversation would be fascinating. Yet today I hold back. I know my curiosity sometimes turns me into a beggar for stories, a ridiculous traveler who pulls answers from strangers out of sheer hunger to understand. I don’t want to embarrass my companions. Not this time.
And still, as the train moves forward, I know that if fate ever offers me another chance like this, I won’t let it pass me by.
Already in Rome, I realize the city has been taken over, sirens granting no respite. They cut through the air in waves, pushing convoys of armored cars through streets watched by the cold eyes of the police. Every corner feels like an improvised checkpoint. Tourists are tolerated, but I feel the gaze of a thousand eyes on my neck. Rome doesn’t breathe—it endures.
The pilgrims I imagined filling every square are barely scattered drops. I see groups of boy scouts walking with the solemnity of a procession. Priests in worn cassocks slip among the crowd like forgotten relics of another time. A cripple, who long ago lost his leg, drags his crutches through the holy city in the hope a new one might grow. The cardinals, with silver crosses gleaming on their chests, red caps, shining sashes, and sunglasses, hardly look at him; they glide through the crowd like swans in a pond, ignoring the frogs splashing below.
I keep moving forward. And though I know it, every step surprises me: to reach the future tomb of a fisherman in sandals, I must walk past modern temples of luxury—shop windows of Prada, Rolex, Patek Philippe. My reflection slips across immaculate glass displays that hold nothing sacred except the cult of money.
The city is dressed in its finest. It is a Jubilee year, and Rome has been cleaned, restored, polished to the extreme to welcome the lame, the blind, the sick, the broken, dragging their bodies and their faith through ancient streets, seeking the blessing of a man who can no longer raise his hand.
Rome doesn’t stop. It has seen 265 popes die before Francis. Its walls have wept, its stones have run with blood, it has cheered, betrayed, endured. And still it goes on. Always on. Immortal not because of its marble, but because of its ability to outlive itself.
And I, walking among these echoes of grandeur and misery, know that Rome teaches a silent lesson: what seems eternal is not glory, nor fame, nor power. What is eternal is simply carrying on—like that nun with her inherited sandals, like this train, like each step after step between sirens and stone.
This time I remain silent. But next time, I promise, I won’t let the voice of those who walk close to the earth pass me by.