Everyone should miss a flight at least once – as long as the location is congenial, the circumstances understandable and the mitigation reasonable. In my case the triad works perfectly: Rome; lunch; sloshed. It was an excellent meal in a little <em>osteria</em> on the Via Pellegrino, which curves gently behind the Vatican end of the Corso. I had caught up with an old university friend who was studying for the priesthood at the Venerable English College, and wine had been taken. “When are you heading back?” he asked, as the <em>digestivi</em> arrived.
It all worked out perfectly in the end. Pulling myself together, I rang the relevant enquiries desk at the airport and – somehow – persuaded the nice Italian lady at the other end to transfer my booking to the evening flight instead. “I’ve been delayed,” I told her, which was technically true – although I’m still not sure she quite believed me. Anyway, a few hours hanging about in Fiumicino did me no harm, and I found a copy of Robert Hughes’s <em>Rome</em> in the bookshop, which became my bedside reading for the next couple of weeks.
Like so many other people, I first went to Rome as a tourist. Family holidays gave way to choir tours; the latter began in my first Long Vac at Oxford. We went at the start of August, which was scorchingly hot (an error not to be repeated) but at least I caught the feast of Our Lady of the Snows at St Mary Major, with white petals fluttering down from the gold-coffered ceiling at the intonation of the Gloria. The two girls who joined me bought white mantillas for the Mass. One drank herself to death 10 years later; I did not marry the other.
I only really got to know Rome properly when I began to use various local archives for my doctoral research. It was a daunting start; my supervisor, the late Fr Ian Ker, had to write to the Prefect of the Vatican Secret Archive – renamed the Apostolic Archive by Pope Francis in 2022 to make it sound a bit less sinister – to confirm that I was a suitable person to be granted access to the records of Propaganda Fide. By return of post I received an approving letter with a grand crest and seal, which in due course I presented at the front desk.
In retrospect, working in the reading room of what had by then become the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, and is now the Dicastery for Evangelisation, was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. Naturally, as a young graduate student, I took it for granted. Its documents chanted a litany of the history of the Church; I once turned a page and realised with a jolt that I was looking at a draft of <em>Universalis Ecclesiae</em>, the document by which Pius IX re-established the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850.
One sunny morning I was taking a stroll in the pretty college gardens on the slopes of the Janiculum Hill when I heard loud cheering on the other side of the balustrade that overlooks St Peter’s Square. Glancing over, I found a packed-out General Audience about to begin; a familiar vehicle wove its way through the crowds. Me, with my near-bird’s eye view, and in the middle of the throng below Pope Benedict XVI, blessing the people as he went; his <em>solideo</em> a tiny speck of white in the middle of a sea of waving arms and smiling faces.
The other cache of papers into which I delved on a regular basis was at the English College, the Venerabile, still training priests on the site it has occupied for hundreds of years. That was quite a different proposition, as a visit to the library there inevitably included an invitation to lunch as well. On my first visit I made the mistake of having a second enormous helping of gnocchi; used to British institutions, I had assumed it was the only savoury course. Saltimbocca followed, and then pudding and fruit. It was not a very productive afternoon.
Others were, however, and when the task was over I missed the boisterous camaraderie of the place; I continue to treasure the many friendships that I made. Furthermore, I shared an alma mater with St Ralph Sherwin, the Venerabile’s protomartyr. Just as his name appeared in the <em>Liber Ruber</em>, the list of the signatures of seminarians arriving year on year, so ours had been added – centuries apart – to the matriculation roll of Exeter College, whose arms appear next to him in a stained-glass window on the grand main staircase.
I’m not sure I can pin down my favourite memories. They certainly include baking afternoons on the Venerabile’s sun-drenched roof terrace; Aperol under the gaze of Giordano Bruno in the Campo de’ Fiori; singing nuns at L’Eau Vive on the Via Monterone; dashing to hear the Pope’s Angelus address after college Mass on Sunday mornings; coffee in the Piazza Farnese; Brigittine sisters in their distinctive veils; late nights in Caffè Peru’; gossip from Rome and home alike.
Nostalgia’s not what it used to be. I was last in the Eternal City before the pandemic, for the canonisation of St John Henry Newman – and what a lot of water has flowed under many bridges since then. I am overdue a visit, and must make amends. As it happens, a few of my former students are planning a bicycle ride through Umbria and Lazio this summer. Normally I’d gladly drive the support vehicle, but with the exuberance of youth they’ve planned to arrive in the <em>caput mundi</em> for the Assumption.
Rome at <em>Ferragosto</em>? Not a chance.
<em>Serenhedd James’s doctoral thesis was published as </em>George Errington and Roman Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century England<em>, Oxford University Press (2016)</em>
