The Dreaming God

Better Know A Mytheme

In March I was at the Villa Palazzola, at Lake Albano, a perched hotel just under forty minutes outside of Rome; I suspect some of you may know it (and that is easily the most Wes Anderson thing I have ever had the chance to write). I was there the week just before Easter: Palazzola was once a monastery, and now functions as a hotel, which the Venerable English College uses for its retreats and is otherwise open to the public. With a plaza overlooking the lake and access to the trail that encircles it, carrying the would-be viator on the same paths where Romulus and Remus erstwhile once made their living like Robin Hood, robbing the rich and giving to the poor shepherds of the land, across the way to the Castel Gandolfo, former summer home of the Pope. And the Saturday evening before the last day of the conference I was there for—a week of speaking Latin, with other students and teachers of classics, Latinists all—one of the priests who happened to be onsite offered Mass in the chapel, so I went, knowing that I would be unable to go to a Palm Sunday liturgy the following morning.

Older buildings in Italy often lack any internal air control, and so Palazzola was very cold most of the time that I was there, the chapel all the more so. My clothes did not match, and by this point in the week I was fairly disheveled, having been able to wash my clothes in the available machine but not to dry them (driers are uncommon outside of the United States). I was tired, lean, and hungry, too, and I knew that I was missing out on a bit of lecture and music happening elsewhere. And one of the other participants, whom I did not know quite well, decided to pop in as well.

The priest was an elderly Australian man; the two younger priests on this trip were also Aussies, and I was given to understand that they were all connected through their order in the United Kingdom, though the two of them were here for Latin and the older one was not. He came in, donned his stole, and invited myself and the other young man to come up to the bema for Mass, given that no one else was around. He asked if I was baptized; I told him yes. The other young man was unsure: he said he thought he must have been, as a baby, but that he did not know for certain. “Well, no matter,” the priest replied; “you can take communion.”