In Villa Borghese lies Canova's Venus.  In the room prior to this reclining goddess, the sister of Napoleon on her cushy marble couch, is what some believe the climax of the Bernini collection.  David strains, gripping a slung stone, his outstretched arm captured in the motion of flinging the rock with determination at an unseen monstrous foe, which we can only imagine by the look in his eyes.  The body is like a turbulent discus thrower--every muscle extended and bulging.  The face is that of Bernini himself. 

I found myself wandering the many art galleries throughout Europe over the course of that semester ten years ago, seeker of esoteric knowledge that I am.  I could not help but think that everything, no matter how hard we try to preserve it, will fade, crumble, sink into oblivion.  We call the works of 400 or even a 100 years ago "art history" and try to describe why they are beautiful, rare, or valued.  No one, especially they who appreciate these works, would believe what I saw that night--what happened in that moment on an underground Metro car heading toward Termini.  It must have been after midnight, though I never carry a watch, and had recently finished a huge free meal with wine due to an invitation from a professor.  He and my classmates were in Rome at the same time, on a four star trip that I could not afford.

As I entered the Metro station, I noticed a few locals being ushered past the turnstiles by the navy-coated station's policemen.  I waved to get their attention and was astonished when they also let me through for a free ride.  It was balmy.  I leaned on a chalky post waiting for the train.  My jacket suffered for that one--it being a pinkish beige and the pillar marking it with an oxidized orange residue. When the train crept in like a negligent marathoner, chummily inviting the stragglers to join it for a rickshaw ride, I stepped inside. 

The doors closed; the air was stale.  I sat down after a long day of walking.  I was sleepy; my legs ached.  In what I thought was only a moment, I opened my eyes, and the car was empty, seemingly moving along with a volition of its own.  The recorded Italian Momma voice shouted out the next stop.  I heard a name but did not recognize it as one of the stops on the way to Termini--it being the closest depot near the little cheap but clean hostel where I was staying.  Looking up at one of the X-shaped maps with a blue and red (A and B line), I saw Repubblica and several others I knew, but what she had just said?

The train jerked to a stop.  I stood, staggered, and grabbed hold of one of the poles.  All the doors opened.  I thought maybe the train might turn around and take me back to the familiar city, but it just waited there.  The announcement by the Momma sounded something like "Last stop...get off here."  I was too tired to bother to take my backpack off earlier, so I just readjusted the straps and crossed the threshold. 

Like any ordinary metro stop in Rome, it had the colored tile patterned to form letters announcing some traditional name for the location.  With the right extras, I mused, it could still serve as the backdrop to a 60's Fellini film.  In fact, hadn't it?  I ascended the concrete stairs wondering where I was.  The tiles had proclaimed this Campagna Bella.  Something beautiful, I thought.  Reaching a landing that had further stairs to the right and left, I was shocked to not find dim streetlight, as I expected.  Going up the stairs to the right, I encountered blinding brightness. 

I squinted in the light and shielded my eyes with my right forearm.  "What in the..."  I was in a field--a sunny field--or a meadow maybe.  Not only wasn't it night anymore, but it wasn't early spring.  By the look of the weeds or grain, which were swaying lightly, it was late summer or early fall.  Golden brown, brown, and brown as far as the eye could see, except for a small cluster of trees in the distance.  I looked back to where I had come from and it was just two holes in the middle of the field--one for the right exit, and across from it, one for the left exit.  I rubbed my eyes, still convinced I was hallucinating, but the sun scorching my face in a cloudless blue sky insisted otherwise. 

Peeling off my backpack temporarily, I retrieved a wide-brimmed hat which I always carry on my travels, primarily as a substitute umbrella.  Its wax coating and chin strap makes it ideal for all kinds of seasonal climatic changes.  I had already considered going back down into the station and waiting for the next train, but I was too damned curious not to explore this place.  After adjusting my hat, I gingerly reached out and touched one of the dry plants.  It was real, alright.  It had the sinewy feel of flax or papyrus.  I leaned in and took a sniff.  It was pleasant, like dried cornhusks on tamales.

Scanning the horizon without moving my head, I decided to crunch off in the direction of the cluster of trees.  The field did not contain neat rows of a crop known to me.  No, these were all one sort of a weed that grows waist high, at least on my waist.  I'm probably below average nowadays, I thought.  But, there were times when the average male height was comparable to mine, as in the early Roman Empire, or so I read somewhere.  I, perhaps, would have seemed to be an Amazon to the cave dwellers in Europe tens of thousands of years ago--that is if they stuck around long enough to hear the Greek tales.  

From aerial view, this scene would consist of two rectangular black holes in a honey-hued field, and my dark brown hat cutting a diagonal line toward a club-shaped cluster of green.  Seeing a dark shape out of the corner of my eye, I halted and held my breath without meaning to.  There was something shiny, something moving slowly, something living.  Oh god, please don't let it be a giant roach was all I could think.  I parted the sheaves of the dried plants.  There it was--a giant land tortoise maybe four feet in length and two feet high.  Its rough, wrinkly self was going in the opposite direction of me.  Do they have tortoises in Europe?  I didn't know.  I thought, certainly North America, the Pacific.  I was pretty sure, scrambling to keep a grip on reality, that there was plenty to eat around here for such a creature.  I remember hearing that Darwin had rode one of them, a cousin I suppose, while on the Galapagos Islands.  Recalling the sense of undignified injustice the naturalist had done to the creature, which has a lifespan nearly double our own, I let him, or her, alone.

Onward I moved toward the trees, which seemed to relish towering over the horizontal plane.  They were some type of evergreen, pine maybe, and very tall and straight.  Arriving just under them, and I counted nine, I realized they cast a shadow over a depression in the earth just beyond, which was impossible to see from any other vantage point in the endless field.  In the shadows was what seemed to be a small tilted shack with maybe one or two rooms.  I thought I must be looking at the back end, because there were no windows or doors on this side. 

As usual, I leaned to the right and descended the slope.  I could never explain why I only felt safe going to the right, unless I consciously forced myself to turn left, if either choice was about the same, like in movie theatres or in classrooms, or even why I dreamed freest on my stomach with the left half of my brain on the pillow at first, and the right half in the morning, but I did.  So, I took my typical route around to the front and found a square post attempting to corner out the structure while bolstering it from total collapse.  The post's lumber matched a wooden planked porch, arranged tightly on the dirt below.  An empty chair sat on the porch.  It was as weathered as the siding of the shack, the blue-white and touches of brown showing a time when this operation was freshly painted, but bits of sand and wind had blasted most of it away.  It was cool here.  The slight breeze soothed my face.  I took off my hat.  I was in the middle of a deep reflection on some past scene in my life when I heard a creaking coming from inside this sole example of a human presence on the plain.

I stared at the old man as he came through the door frame onto the porch.  He wore a hand tailored white shirt; his hands were rough and worn.  His green pants ended mid-calf, and his white hair and mustache looked a bit like photographs of Mark Twain, only shorter on the top and a mixture of white and dark gray.  He was barefoot.  Maybe thirty seconds of an eternity passed before he spoke.  "I see you're finally here."

I was shocked that he even knew English, but his was a perfect American accent.  Could've been West Coast, Midwest, or even non-urban East.  I wasn't sure yet.  Maybe he had a television in there.  I didn't see a dish or an antenna on the sheet-metal roof.  I didn't know what to say.  "Yeah, I got off on the last stop."

"Not many do."  He tied a red bandana around his neck and started off in the direction of the field beyond the shady depression.  "Are you coming?" he called, not looking over his shoulder.

"Coming...where?"  I watched him sling a pickaxe over his shoulder and then march up the hill opposite the shack. 

"Coming to see it?"  He said it with such confidence that after taking a precursory look around, I knew there was nothing I could do but find out what this was all about.  I slapped on my hat and pulled it down straight as I hurried to catch him, bounding up the slope, and finding he was still a good twenty paces ahead of me.  What I saw before me were rows and rows of a plowed section of the plain.  Clearly, he was responsible for this even though I noticed no farm equipment except for hand tools near the shack.  He stopped abruptly in the middle of the field and dug his pickaxe into the rich, brown earth.  He struck again, then once more, and wiped his forehead.  I was close enough to see the lines of his face. 

"Hot isn't it?" he asked.

I nodded.

"You see Carlito?"

"Carlito?"

"Giant turtle."

"Oh, the tortoise...yeah.  Is the tortoise native to Italy?" I queried.

"Beats the hell out of me," he said with a smile, leaning on his pickaxe.  "He's been around here as long as I or anyone else can remember."

I looked down at my feet.  I guess I must have appeared disappointed because he then went at it with the pickaxe again, furiously digging a hole.  I looked at him striking the ground and couldn't help but ask, "What are you doing?"

He struck two or three more times before answering.  "Look inside."

I took a step forward.  "In the hole?"

"Yes."

It occurred to me that the hole was only the size of my head and I wasn't going to put it in there with a stranger brandishing a pickaxe, but as I drew closer, he backed off and I could see bright blue coming up from under the ground--even brighter than the sky above.  I dropped my pack and peered down.  Inside was a swirling vortex that felt like it was magnetically drawing me inside.  First I saw a tiny pebble with chip marks and a deer antler carved into a spoon.  As I looked down deeper and deeper, my head all the way inside now, I saw dark vases with human figures, ugly anthropomorphic animal sculptures, and paintings on both walls and canvases.  The hole had no end to it--swirling and expanding with images and sounds emanating from all times and places and forms.  An opera was going; a theatre play from the 1940's; a ballet I didn't recognize.  In fact, I didn't recognize any of them except as being creations from the mind and skill of man in various genres.  I couldn't take it all in--I felt like I was only seeing a millionth of everything in the spinning bright blue funnel.  It took all my strength to pull myself out of the tide.  As I returned to a different kind of brightness, I rubbed my eyes. 

There was the old man leaning on his tool.  He smiled.  "See what you came for?"

I looked at him, puzzled.  "What was that?"

"Silly, that's what they think has been lost forever."

"What do you mean?"

"All the wars...all the galleries and homes that burn down...burial by volcanoes... passage of time.  It's all here."

"The art, everything humankind has ever created...it all ends up here?"

"Of course."

"Is this Italy?"

He laughed at me with pure joy as if a child had asked why apes can't swim.

"You're telling me you're the curator."

"Sure, I'm his eminence the curator."  He made an exaggerated bow.

This was all too much for me.  "So why all the plowing on such an important site?"

"Oh this isn't the important part."

"It isn't."  My statement hung in the air.

"No, I must take care of the soil."

"What do you grow?"

"You've seen the fields," he said.

"They're all shriveled and scattered."

"Those are the ones lying fallow.  I will plant them again another year."

"Oh."  I looked up at the sun again.  "Isn't it the wrong season to plant...whatever it is you're planting?"

"No...there's never a bad time for what I plant." 

"Won't it die?"

"It all dies.  Now is its season for life."

"I don't see any sprouts."

"Of course you don't.  You won't see what I grow until it's gone under...making way for the new...nourishing it with all that is, was, and has been...not around here anyway."

"But you can see it somewhere?"

"Get back on your train."

I shook my head.  As I did, I found my whole body shaking.  A voice broke up my thoughts.  The Italian Momma shouted "Termini!"  I opened my eyes.  The doors flung open.