A thousand years ago, rooks haunted the skies above the Porta Flaminia. On winter afternoons, as the early dark closed over the city, they spread their wings and circled above the crumbling ramparts of the old Aurelian walls, crying like lost children. To the washerwomen at the fountain in Piazza del Popolo the birds were demons, anima in pena, tormented souls who had flapped out of the bowels of hell.

The birds, which had been there as long as anyone could remember, roosted in walnut trees by the ancient gateway. The trees were said to have grown over the family tomb of the Emperor Nero. Circling among the rooks, people believed, was the restless ghost of the old tyrant himself.

It was Pope Paschal II who finally decided to do something about the birds. The end of the 11th century was a difficult time for Popes. The great political rivalry between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, that would convulse much of Europe for three centuries or more, had reached a bitter pass. Anti-popes popped up as regularly as outbreaks of disease, while Rome itself had become a battleground for supporters of the Pope and the Emperor. To large swathes of the Roman citizenry, and a number of influential Roman barons, Paschal was an illegitimate upstart.

In any era, the Papacy is a kind of theatre, a question of spectacle and symbolism. In this, the city and its chief actor are made for one another. Rome loves nothing more than a performance. The bird thing was not just a matter of pest control. It was a public demonstration, a way for Paschal to show what a real Pope was about, even to issue a coded warning about the dangers of emperors. He saw as the Church’s current persecutors by chasing the ghost of Nero, one of its earliest.'  

The birds didn’t really stand a chance. The Pope came himself to Piazza del Popolo, in procession, from the old St Peter’s, to conduct the exorcism. It was an extravagant and colourful display. Paschal would have crossed the Tiber in front of Castel Sant’Angelo, still remembered then as the tomb of Hadrian. Carried in a papal litter, he wore scarlet robes copied from those of the Roman emperors, the kind of robes that Hadrian himself would have worn crossing the river at this same point almost a thousand years before. Among the caparisoned horses of robed prelates and bishops, rode sub deacons carrying the pontifical handkerchief, in case the Pope wanted to spit or wipe his mouth. Bringing up the rear were the Papal prefects, junior figures who enjoyed the curious distinction of wearing one red sock and one golden one.

Holy water had been brought from St Peter’s, crucifixes were presented, prayers were intoned, the devil and all his works were condemned. Exorcism was often completed with the ritual of exsufflation. Dressed in a manner familiar to Nero himself and adorned with the insignia of imperial Rome, the Pope leant forward and blew three times in the form of a cross on the leaves of the walnut trees, the roost of the bothersome rooks.   

Perhaps less confident than the crowds of onlookers about the power of his own breath, Paschal then ordered the walnut trees to be cut down, and the remains of the tomb beneath them to be unearthed and dumped in the Tiber. Workmen carted the broken stones of Nero’s last sanctuary to the river banks. Somewhere among the clattering rubble, the emperor’s ancient bones slipped into the slow green water and drifted downstream towards the ruined Forum and the quarried Coliseum. In the fine clouds of mortar and lime, whitening the hands and faces of the workmen, was the dust of Nero himself.     

*                         *                           *

Everyone has their own Rome, a sentimental map of the city, a personal geography of streets with meanings, corners of fateful rendezvous, cafes where life suddenly shifted on its axis. Piazza del Popolo is central to mine. Its cobblestones represent some nodal point, the place where my Roman stories began, and are in the habit of converging.

The piazza has changed somewhat since Pascal arrived to excommunicate the bird life. But the old Aurelian walls are still there, part of the antique litter of the city, as are the fountains, now in more elaborate guise. Where the washerwomen once grumbled, Romans and visitors settle on stone benches to enjoy the sun.  The shadow of the obelisk that Augustus brought back from Egypt after defeating Anthony and Cleopatra, standing at the centre of the square, turns round the cobblestones through the day, like the shadow of a sundial. The chapel that Pascal ordered to be built on the site of the walnut trees has been replaced by the 15th century S. Maria del Popolo, one of Rome’s most august churches, famous for its Caravaggios and its Borgia connections. As for the old Porta Flaminia, it was rebuilt in the 16th century as the Porta del Popolo, a triumphal arch, a grand entrance to Rome.

Take a seat at a cafe in the square and you can watch the players come and go. Two Carabinieri saunter by, elegant figures in pressed uniforms, more dress parade than constable on the beat. A priest in uniform black bearing a crimson folder, hurries up the steps of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Roman parents pass with their well-laundered children trailing balloons. Visitors pause with maps, turning them upside down to orientate themselves. Opposite Dal Bolognese, where film stars dine on Saturday evenings and cardinals take Sunday lunch, a traffic warden in a dazzling white uniform adorned with enough braid to embarrass an admiral, turns a bored face to a long gesticulating story about why a Fiat 500 was parked on the church steps. Two nuns emerge from Via del Babuino and hurry across the square, arm in arm, a kind of mutual protection, as they pass a young couple on the rim of the central fountain, entwining their limbs, and possibly their futures, against a backdrop of silver water.

When I first came to Rome thirty years ago, I stayed in a pensione just off this square. The establishment no longer exists but I remember a high-ceilinged room, tall shuttered windows with one or two cracked panes, a door with a decorative pediment that I am sure included cupids, a beautiful receptionist, and the sound of a saxophone drifting up from the corner of Via Angelo Brunetti in the evenings. At night, when the saxophonist had gone home and the traffic ceased, I could hear the fountains in the piazza.

Every morning, I sallied forth on an old scooter someone had lent me to explore the city. I careened between ancient ruins and baroque sculpture and delicious meals, between Roman triumphal arches, the soft thighs of Bernini’s Proserpina in the Galleria Borghese, and divine croissants in a bar in the Via Ripetta. I discovered -- in those days everything was a discovery -- Santa Maria in Trastevere, barnacled with age, its gold-hued interior, freighted with incense and prayer. I made a pilgrimage to Velasquez’s portrait of Innocent X in Palazzo Doria Pamphilj and another to Sant’Anselmo on the Aventine Hill, where Benedictine monks filled the Roman dusk with Gregorian chant. At night, I climbed the steps of the Capitoline hill, to Michelangelo’s exquisite piazza and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, bathed in moonlight; in that remote time, it was still the real statue and not a facsimile. I gazed down on the ruins of the Forum, from the spot where Gibbon had conceived the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and where John Wilkes and his mistress, Gertrude Corradini, overcome by desire, had disappeared behind some ruins while their guide distracted Gertrude’s mother. 

In a restaurant in Campo dei Fiori I ate a pasta so delicious -- it involved egg yolk, pancetta and truffles -- that I came back for it three nights running. But of course, it was never just the pasta. It was the theatre of the place -- the white linen, the candlelight, the other diners voluble at their tables, the rubric promise of the menus, the parade of tantalising dishes, and the aproned waiters, professional sardonic men, who had found a career in this culinary glamour, and not just a way of paying off their tuition fees.

The restaurant illustrated one of the central issues of Roman life -- the ease with which Romans relish worldly pleasures, and thus the way pleasure and beauty in Rome have become so exquisitely refined. There is beauty in Rome at every turn, from a gorgeous archway in a side alley to the morning cappuccino, as handsome as it is delicious, from the paintings of Raphael to the cashmere scarves that were the male fashion accessory of the season. Not for Roman men subdued navy or grey; their scarves were a palette of peacock colours, a flourish of lemon yellows, pale blues, rose pinks. This was different from my world, where beauty could be admired, but was also slightly suspect; appearances were deemed to be superficial, even deceptive. In my world no one would trust a man wearing a rose-coloured cashmere scarf. 

How long did I stay that first time -- four or five months, I think, from a wintry November through to spring. I remember the chestnuts roasting on the corners of Piazza dei Spagna, and the Abruzzese shepherds in their fleece waistcoats in the streets at Christmas, playing their bag pipes for coins. I remember the divine stationers, Vertecchi in Via Condotti, a temple for anyone who has ever put pen to paper. I remember mass at St Peter’s on Christmas Eve, the ranks of choirs, the red cardinals, the elaborate flummery, the Pope, a distant figure like a tiny white puppet beneath Bernini’s colossal Baldacchio. I remember the plane trees overhanging the river, coming into leaf with fat sappy buds, and the way their old roots had cracked and lifted the pavements along the Lungotevere, like buried bones rising to the surface. 

At one point, I even managed to get arrested, always a great option for getting under the skin of a place. It was while I was musing on Marcus Aurelius and Gibbon on the empty Capitoline, in the middle of the night. It was the 70’s, the days of anxieties about the Red Brigade, who, a few years later, would kidnap and murder Aldo Moro. I seemed to fit the profile of the foreign revolutionary -- tattered maps of Rome, a notebook full of illegible scribbling, a jacket with a hole at the elbow. To a Roman, anyone so shabbily dressed had to be guilty of something; while I waited for the questioning down at the station, I could hear a couple of the policemen in the adjoining room bemoaning my terrible trousers. In the end, there was no need of the thumbscrews; a brief interrogation, followed by a trip in a police car to the Piazza del Popolo pensione, to retrieve my passport for purposes of identification, convinced the Carabinieri that I was just a hapless innocent in a pair of dodgy trousers.

I haunted the old Lion’s Bookshop in Via del Babuino, where I bought books on the Renaissance and the Baroque, on Raphael and Caravaggio. I stood dumbstruck beneath the great embrace of the Pantheon’s dome, in the Vatican’s Gallery of Maps with its fanciful geographies, in front of Michelangelo’s Pieta, on the Pincio looking over a landscape of domes, in a bank, watching a teller simultaneously serve six customers, all with complex financial transactions. At night I came home to the Piazza del Popolo. Alone in my high spartan room, I worried about the course of my life as I listened to the murmur of water from the piazza. Come the morning the clamour of the city overwhelmed the delicate sound of water, and my worries evaporated. Rome awaited, and if I stood on an upturned basin, and hung onto one of the splintered shutters to lean out over the Via Ripetta, I could just glimpse the dazzle of the fountains in the early light.

As for the beautiful receptionist, I only ever managed to exchange five words with her -- la mia chiave, per favore -- my key please. The episode with the police had done nothing to improve my profile, and she seemed to be waiting for the good news that I was checking out. I obliged a few days later when I got an offer to house-sit a friend’s apartment near the Campo dei Fiori.

In the years since that first visit, my travels have been promiscuous, and I have fallen for many cities, and perhaps a few receptionists as well. But the attachment to Rome survived. I had friends in the city, and life had a curious way of prodding me back towards the Tiber, so that Rome became a persistent presence, a touchstone. I was never long away from it. 

*                             *                                   *

Now thirty years after that first visit, I was back in Piazza del Popolo. It was two am, on a night in late November. I had stopped to listen to the fountains, to the sound of water. It is the sound that Rome makes. During the day it can be difficult to hear above the wheezing buses in the Piazzale Flaminia, the grind of traffic on the Lungotevere, the whining scooters turning into Via Ripetta. But if you come late at night, when the traffic has died away, this is what you hear: the whisper of water on stone, the sound of fountains, the only sound in the square that has been here from the beginning, from the days of the rooks.

Two AM is a wonderful hour to be in Rome, when the city is populated only by cats and statues. In the still streets, the old buildings seem to step forward in the moonlight, to inhabit fully their own world, their own past, in a way that is not possible when the traffic is whirling and a surge of pedestrians is trying to cross at the lights.

In this nocturnal city, the Coliseum loomed through the pines of the Parco di Traiano like a ghost ship, its dark arches full of possibilities. At the Circus Maximus the southern track was a swathe of moonlight. Across the river, the Castel Sant’ Angelo was suddenly a tomb again. When I paused on the Lungotevere and glanced through the tall windows of the Ara Pacis, the long procession of Augustus’ handsome family seemed to have assembled at this hour only to meet me. At the end of the row of figures, a child tugged on a toga for attention, while another raised its arms to be picked up.

I left the car near the Ponte Margherita and descended into the wide bowl of the Piazza del Popolo. It was one of those delicious moments when the turning world seemed to pause, when time was stilled. The empty piazza echoed with the sibilant cascade of the fountains. I sat on the rim of the central one where four lions spouted thin fans of water like imperfect panes of glass. Above me was the obelisk, quarried in Aswan on the banks of the Upper Nile, over three thousand years before.  

I had just come from the birth of my daughter, who was born in the Santa Famiglia Clinic just over six hours ago. I had missed the birth itself because I had been trying to park the car. I would have liked to have been on hand to greet her arrival, but in Rome the vexed issue of parking tends to take precedence over all else. I met a Roman once who had got divorced over parking; there had been an irretrievable breakdown of their resident’s permit.  

I had dropped Irene at the door of the clinic, ushering her inside to a posse of nurses, while a queue of cars leant on their horns in the street. Then I had hurried off to find a parking space. Half an hour later I was still looking. Romans would have long since abandoned their cars in the middle of the street to rush into the clinic. But I had not been in Rome long enough, and still had naive concerns about blocking traffic and bringing the district of Prati to a halt. Sometime, perhaps on my eighth fruitless circuit of the Piazza Quiriti, where plumes of water arced into ancient basins nicked from the Baths of Caracalla, Sophia arrived in the world.

When I finally made it back to the clinic, she was already in il nido, the nest or nursery. Someone pointed me to a cot by the window. Looking down at her for the first time, I felt the world shudder to a halt.

In that first moment, her face was like a misericord, not new but something very old, intricate, arcane, polished by centuries. She lay there bare-chested, the stub of her umbilicus pegged shut, her clenched fists hanging onto invisible ropes as she lowered herself into the world.  While nurses padded to and fro across the room, oblivious to this miracle, I laid my hand over her scalp. Her head was warm, slightly flushed, her hair as fine as spider’s web. All that she would be -- that part of her destiny that was her own and not the world’s -- lay within the span of my palm. I bent my head, and laid my ear on her tiny chest to hear the sound of her heart, beating like a promise. I thought of birds, fallen to earth, their bones as light as air, the soft pulse in their breasts.  

Perhaps, when you are younger, children arrive in your life with less shattering effect. But I was in my fifties, both of my own parents were dead, and Sophia was my first child. She arrived like a revelation, capsizing all about her. I realised that I had not known a thing about love, about the helplessness of it, until this sudden moment. Sunlight streamed through the windows, across my arms and onto her face.

When my parents died, I felt that I bore them with me into decades they would never see. I remember emerging from the catharsis of my father’s memorial service into an unreasonably bright afternoon, into a quiet street where cars slid past unperturbed, where people stopped to talk on corners of other things, feeling that I was holding his whole life in my arms, the whole intricate thing, that he had handed it to me suddenly, without a word, before disappearing. And I not known what to do with it, where to put it, until now.

Later, with Sophia and her mother asleep, I stole home, to get some fresh clothes. And so, I came to Piazza del Popolo in the hollow of the night, the hour when they say souls escape, the hour when my mother had died, asleep in her bed, dreaming as always of Ireland, the hour when the sound of water seems to be the only sound in Rome. As I sat by the fountain, I was overcome by tears thinking of the new life across the city, the stranger asleep in her cot, her brow furrowed with her first dreams, her feet drawn up, treading air. Tears are often inexplicable; these were, perhaps, prompted by the way the moment of birth had recalled the finality of death, the way the present had dredged so profoundly some of the deepest currents of the past.

‘The past is not dead,’ William Faulkner said. ‘It is not even past.’ That the past lives so powerfully in our many presents is one of the lessons of Rome. This city is the proving ground for time’s fluidity, for how porous is the frontier between past and present. Time is an alchemy. We are not alone in this moment; we are knee-deep in other moments, other times. All the clutter of my own past was here with me, on the rim of this fountain in the middle of the night, in Rome.   

In that moment my life changed, but Rome changed too. The city was suddenly central to my personal geography. It was the city of my daughter. She would grow up here. Rome was acquiring new meanings, and its old meanings acquired a new resonance. I splashed my face in the spray of water from one of the lion’s mouths, a christening in the waters of the Acqua Vergine which had been pouring into Rome’s fountains for two thousand years.

All over the city, the waters of Rome were pouring into fountains, the sound echoing through Rome’s stilled streets and squares, as it has done since long before Caesar was concerned about Brutus’ loyalty. All over Rome those who are awake at this hour listen to the sibilant voice of Rome lapping into their rooms through open windows. Across town, it echoed from the Fontana del Trilussa past the window of il nido where Sophia was asleep in the cocoon of her first dreams. In the Piazza di Spagna, the whisper of water rose from the Barcaccia Fountain, as it had done when Keats lay dying in the narrow room by the Spanish Steps, gazing up at the ceiling, that his friend Joseph Severn had painted with flowers for him. It was the sound that filled the Piazza del Popolo now, in the dead of night. What was its ambivalent measure – some whisper of continuity, or a warning about the fluidity of the passing days and years?

*                                  *                                      *

There are many ways to discover a foreign city, to make it a part of your life. Sometimes it may be your first great city; you have come to it early, before other cities intrude, and the impression is lasting. Sometimes it is a love affair, in rooms overlooking rooftops, or heartbreak in cafes among indifferent waiters. I was fortunate. For me, it was a child.

Sophia became my regular companion on my explorations of Rome. In her presence, I recaptured the sense of discovery that I had felt on that first visit thirty years before. Rome is full of abandoned clutter, the streets and piazza steeped in the echoes of moments that were once precious. These days with Sophia were my most precious moments, the more precious because of Rome’s constant reminder that they were already disappearing.

In Sophia’s company the world and Rome became a new and wondrous place. For me our journeys in the city were about paintings by Caravaggio or fountains by Bernini or churches far too old to be by anyone. For her it was about trees and rain and birds and ice cream and the full moon appearing suddenly above roofs. I was discovering a city; she was discovering the world.

We travelled by bicycle. She sat behind me, enthroned on her toddler seat, chuckling and chattering, prodding the small of my back from time to time when she felt I was obstructing her view of the Coliseum or St Peters. I stopped to point out things from the miraculous world -- the Carabinieri passing beneath the umbrella pines of the Pincio on their tall horses, the statues of lions in the Piazza del Popolo, boats on the Tiber, a man on stilts with a silver top hat crossing the Piazza Navona.

In her first year, she named her new world into existence. Finding the words -- some English, some Italian -- made things real, and offered reassurance about their reappearance, some guarantee of permanence in a world that must have seemed arbitrary and fluid. At one point it was cats. Once we had the word, we found them everywhere, the cats of Rome loitering beneath cars, perched among ruins, gazing down from window ledges.  Another time it was horses, a visceral fascination. She used the Italian word -- cavallo -- which seemed more adequate to the task of naming them.  When the mounted Carabinieri passed in the Villa Borghese she could not take her eyes off the massive creatures, as she tried to squeeze herself behind my legs for protection. At another moment it was bottoms. In Rome there is never any shortage of sculptural naked bottoms. Among the collections of the Villa Massimo, Sophia went happily, from room to room, pointing out to strangers, the bottoms of classical statues, rolling the word in her mouth: Bot Tom. Before long she had graduated to pointing at the strangers’ own bottoms, tentatively informing them about their presence.   

One day -- she must have been eighteen months or so -- we encountered a military band on the Spanish Steps, in uniforms that looked like they had been pinched from the wardrobe of a Gilbert and Sullivan production. While they played jaunty tunes, Sophia danced in her little blue coat, until the crowd parted around her, smiling indulgently, as she did her two steps in the middle of the wide admiring circle, a star turn, dancing on the old stones of the Piazza dei Spagna, beneath the window of that room where Keats had died, consumed by tuberculosis and thwarted love.

Yet another day we went to a photographic exhibition in the Palazzo Esposizioni and looked for pictures of trees -- stretching the vowel to Italian lengths -- treeeesss. It was a grand day out. We both enjoyed the exhibition, particularly the bit when you sit on the sofa, gazing at the ceiling, laughing together about nothing. Then we cycled to Trastevere, pausing in a bar for coffee for me, and fresh orange juice for her. Afterwards, we browsed in a bookshop where I bought a book on Naples, and she chose a post-card with a picture of a statue of a horse. In Santa Maria Trastevere, that great galleon of a church sunken beneath the weight of centuries, I lit candles for my parents in the gold-hued nave, and Sophia tried to blow them out, as if they were her birthday candles.  

At day’s end, as we made our way home through the Villa Borghese, we liked to stop for a ride on a carousel. Sometimes it was late, the merry-go-round empty, the horses still. But the old attendant knew us, and would crank up the motor as I lifted Sophia onto her favourite steed, a gaudy creature with a golden mane. Standing in its stirrups, she galloped through the gathering twilight with a solemn face, as if she expected to reach some destination in those endless circles.

Afterwards, we gathered up our bicycle again, and rode down the darkening avenue past the maritime pines that Respighi had eulogised in music, past the Fountain of the Sea Horses where four sleek steeds rose out of the basin, endlessly trying to shake themselves free of the sprays of water.  Then fast downhill, past the rows of ancient sycamores, contorted as a gothic tale, and up the rise to the delicate ornamented façade of the Galleria Borghese, where a malarial Caravaggio, surrounded by decaying fruit, gazes into the ghostly central hall. 

Sophia knew the place; her playground was nearby, and we had visited the gallery together where she had occupied herself pointing out some of the loveliest bottoms in Rome. ‘Shoulders, Papa, shoulders,’ she said, and I hoisted her up to sit on my shoulders, so she might peer through the dark windows, to get a glimpse of Bernini’s statues. But she could not see them, and when I put her down again, I explained that was because the statues climbed down from their pedestals at night, when there were no people about, and went about their lives. They went to the loo, they had a bite to eat, they sat on the benches and chatted to one another. Sometimes they climbed through the back windows and went for walk. If you came very late at night to the park, I said, you might see them walking in the avenue of the sycamores, or stretched out on the grass slopes.

Sophia considered all this very carefully. ‘They must be tired standing, Papa,’ she declared at last. ‘They probably like to sleep on the grass.’ Then we mounted our bicycle again, which we had both begun to think of as our steed, and rode down the Avenue of the Birds, past the walled Secret Garden with its orange trees and its statues of unicorns, past the sun dial of four winds. A peacock shrieked from the zoo, a long banshee call, startling us both. We came out through a northern gate as the last of the dusk drained away between the trees. A few minutes later, turning into our street, we found a full moon rising above the rooftops. Sophia stopped wide-eyed. ‘Moon, papa, moon,’ she said, like little Frieda in the Ted Hughes poem, the word round and fat and luscious in her mouth.   

Then we had a bath and supper of pasta and frutta. Later, as I told her a bedtime story about the nocturnal ramblings of the Bernini statues, she fell asleep. I lay listening to her breathing, and to the sound of the water from the small nasone fountain in the street outside, the sound of Rome that was always there, the soft chuckle of the water into its drain.

In the morning Sophia decided that I had got the book and the card thing muddled. The card was mine and the book was hers. She walked around all day with a collection of essays about Naples tucked under her arm while I have a picture of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius propped up on my desk, the one I climbed the steps of the Capitoline to see thirty years ago.