I knew Rome would be beautiful this time of the year, but I had no idea it would be so hot or so humid. A heatwave has bumped up temperatures to 30 degrees or more, making it more like July and August. So I made for the parks and for the banks of the Tiber, where I watched martins hunt on the wing and swifts dive low to drink from the green waters. Where diesel fumes don’t predominate, the air is thick with the scent of jasmine and of the promise of a summer to come.
This is my third time in Rome since I married here in 2000 and I went back, as I always do, to the church where I made my vows. San Girolamo della Carità looked the same as the day my wife and I crossed its threshold. It probably hasn’t changed for decades, if not centuries. With its Baroque facade blackened by fumes of one kind or another and grassy tufts sticking from cracks in its cornices, it is an easy church to ignore if one were to amble along Via di Monserrato in search of a restaurant or a bar. But inside it’s very beautiful. It is the church in which St Philip Neri founded the Oratorians. Philip was a great lover of the English and, as St John Henry Newman mentions in his “Second Spring” homily, priests at the English College opposite would seek his blessing from the steps of his church before they left for the English Mission. He would salute them with the words: “Salvete, flores martyrum!” I married there on 26 May, St Philip’s feast day. I didn’t choose that date intentionally but like to think it was no accident. “How on earth did you manage that?” an Oratorian priest once asked me. I didn’t know what to tell him, but I had an idea.
