A Dialogue Between Two Cloister Visitors

Henry: I approach the Church of Santi Quattro Coronati. This place looks like a medieval fortress after a rainstorm of stones. The walls are a patchwork of different kinds of bricks, all chipped, all worn. I feel unsure when I notice the windows are barred, blocked with wrought iron. It is faintly menacing. I will go on only because I have been in Italy long enough to know that churches delight in surprising, in showing that assumptions are groundless.

Hank: As I approach I am surprised as well, but not with the apprehension I feel at entering. On the door to the cloister of Church of St. Maria della Pace I see a sign advertising free WI-FI inside. Is this really a cloister? Somehow I always associated a cloister with isolation, yet this cloister offers connection to anywhere in the world. The door itself sits in the side of a respectable, marble church. I go on because I have also learned to never trust the exterior of churches. At the door, as well as prohibiting bare shoulders, these churches require that you leave your expectations outside.

As I enter I feel as if I have just passed back into the street. This cloister is a perfect square, surrounded with arches that seem to be made up of competing right angles that build upon one another in an attempt to reach out into the open space. I immediately feel like I am standing in some small alley, but with a dead end on all sides. Yet another paradox. A broken fresco on one of the walls depicts a line of monks trudging out of a structure that resembles the Colosseum. Where are they going? This feels like a place I also should pass through.

Henry: My first sensation was that of clumsiness. This cloister is a place of an inhuman tranquility. I picture an accumulation of fine dust that has taken years to settle. With each intrusive step I scatter that dust back into the air. Movement is difficult here.

Though the cloister is surrounded by a covered a walkway, I am drawn to look out at the garden that resides in the center. This is where Eden has disappeared to. The grasses here are a thick, rich green that gently contrasts itself with the pink gravel covering the pathways. A breeze swoops down from the sky above and the grasshalms bow themselves compassionately before the fountain. To me this place seems a temple to Nature.

Hank: The cloister of St. Maria della Pace has no vegetation. It is all stone and marble. If your cloister is a temple to Nature, mine is a temple to Humanity. I look up at the surrounding walls and I see the human body. Near their top they are all fleshy brown stone, tanned and stained by many years of Italian sun. Deep down where I sit the walls are calcium-white bones, the skeleton that supports the stories above.

The cobblestones in this cloister all slope toward the center. There sits a drain the shape of a human navel. This place consumes, it drinks the water that falls to it from the sky.

Henry: My cloister produces water. At its center stands a fountain from which four fragile threads of water fall. In the pool below, there is an orange smudge that slowly meanders about. It is a goldfish, the sole animal inhabitant. Other than a few substantial rocks, the fish lives alone in this aqueous abode.

It is quiet here, except for the sound of the water. And this murmur somehow seems to increase the silence. Even though there are others here, there is a feeling of isolation that had begun to cover everyone as inevitably and unstoppably as the ice that laces up the surfaces of puddles on a December morning.

Hank: In my cloister it is loud with the clinking of glasses. In one of the upper stories there is a café, and as I look up I see a head suddenly rise up, look, and disappear back to the comfort of a coffee and pastry. Here I am certainly not alone.

Henry and Hank: (In chorus) We leave our cloisters for the world beyond. We leave the temple to Nature and the temple to Man. Amid their stark dissimilarities they together form a whole view of the world existing within only two small courtyards.