One of the strange things that I did growing up in Italy
was avoid seeing most of--
I grew up in Rome.
And I avoided seeing most of the things
that tourists go all the way to Rome
to see for all those 17 years.
I don't know how I managed that but,
I think it was quite lucky.
And last-- two years ago, I went back.
And I'd never visited Keats' rooms on the Piazza di Spagna.
And in fact, the way I got there was I decided to bla--
to buy a black underwear, lingerie, garters.
And the only exclusive store that
sold very sexy underwear turns out
was in the bottom of the building
in which Keats' rooms are.
And after I came out from the shop,
I looked up and lo and behold.
And I thought, well, this is the way he obviously
wanted it to be, so.
[LAUGHING]
I had waited for a good reason.
And it was in August, at the time of year
when everyone is away in Rome and streets are deserted.
And there's this very hot wind, called the sirocco,
blowing all through the streets and picking up dust.
And the Italians say that the sirocco also comes from Africa.
It's not their wind at all.
And it brings madness with it.
In fact, in the countryside, it's
very common to find the people who live on farms, you'll
find that they'll put stones in their pockets
and especially in their children's pockets
because they don't want the sirocco
to steal their soul away.
So they make them heavier.
They're always trying to load me down.
I look like I'm going to fly off.
You probably know if you've ever visited it.
It's very common in any place like this
that there are artifacts of Keats' last months
in glass cases, including a death mask that
was done-- a number of deaths masks,
and one that was done immediately after his death.
And those appear in the poem.
"In Rome, at 26 Piazza di Spagna,
at the foot of a long flight of stairs, are rooms
let to Keats in 1820, where he died.
Now you can visit them, the tiny terrace, the bedroom.
The scraps of paper on which he wrote lines
are kept behind glass, some yellowing, some xeroxed
or mimeographed.
Outside his window, you can hear the sirocco
working the invisible.
Every dry leaf of ivy is fingered, re-fingered.
Who is the nervous spirit of this world that
must go over and over what it already knows, what is it
so hot and dry that's looking through us,
by us, for its answer?
In the arbor on the terrace, the stark hellenic forms of grapes
have appeared.
They'll soften till weak enough to enter
our world, translating helplessly
from the beautiful to the true.
Whatever the spirit, the thickening grapes
are part of its looking and the slow hands that
made this mask of Keats in his other life,
and the old woman, the memorial's custodian, sitting
on the porch beneath the arbor, sorting chickpeas from pebbles
into her cast iron pot.
See what her hands know.
They are its breath, its mother tongue, dividing, discarding.
There is light playing over the leaves, over her face,
making her abstract, making her quick and strange.
But she has no care for what speckles her, changing her.
She is at her work.
Oh, how we want to be taken and changed,
want to be mended by what we enter.
Is it thus with the world?
Does it wish us to mend it, light and dark,
green and flesh?
Will it be free then?
I think the world is a desperate element.
It would have us calm it, receive it.
Therefore, this is what I must ask you to imagine--
wind; the moment when the wind drops;
and grapes, which are nothing, which break in your hands."