WEBVTT

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One of the strange things
that I did growing up in Italy

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was avoid seeing most of--

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I grew up in Rome.

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And I avoided seeing
most of the things

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that tourists go
all the way to Rome

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to see for all those 17 years.

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I don't know how I
managed that but,

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I think it was quite lucky.

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And last-- two years
ago, I went back.

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And I'd never visited Keats'
rooms on the Piazza di Spagna.

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And in fact, the way I got
there was I decided to bla--

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to buy a black underwear,
lingerie, garters.

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And the only
exclusive store that

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sold very sexy
underwear turns out

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was in the bottom
of the building

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in which Keats' rooms are.

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And after I came
out from the shop,

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I looked up and lo and behold.

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And I thought, well, this
is the way he obviously

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wanted it to be, so.

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[LAUGHING]

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I had waited for a good reason.

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And it was in August,
at the time of year

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when everyone is away in Rome
and streets are deserted.

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And there's this very hot
wind, called the sirocco,

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blowing all through the
streets and picking up dust.

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And the Italians say that the
sirocco also comes from Africa.

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It's not their wind at all.

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And it brings madness with it.

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In fact, in the
countryside, it's

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very common to find the people
who live on farms, you'll

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find that they'll put
stones in their pockets

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and especially in their
children's pockets

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because they don't
want the sirocco

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to steal their soul away.

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So they make them heavier.

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They're always trying
to load me down.

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I look like I'm
going to fly off.

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You probably know if
you've ever visited it.

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It's very common in
any place like this

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that there are artifacts
of Keats' last months

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in glass cases, including
a death mask that

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was done-- a number
of deaths masks,

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and one that was done
immediately after his death.

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And those appear in the poem.

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"In Rome, at 26
Piazza di Spagna,

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at the foot of a long
flight of stairs, are rooms

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let to Keats in
1820, where he died.

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Now you can visit them, the
tiny terrace, the bedroom.

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The scraps of paper on
which he wrote lines

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are kept behind glass, some
yellowing, some xeroxed

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or mimeographed.

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Outside his window, you
can hear the sirocco

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working the invisible.

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Every dry leaf of ivy is
fingered, re-fingered.

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Who is the nervous
spirit of this world that

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must go over and over what
it already knows, what is it

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so hot and dry that's
looking through us,

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by us, for its answer?

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In the arbor on the terrace, the
stark hellenic forms of grapes

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have appeared.

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They'll soften till
weak enough to enter

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our world,
translating helplessly

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from the beautiful to the true.

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Whatever the spirit,
the thickening grapes

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are part of its looking
and the slow hands that

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made this mask of Keats
in his other life,

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and the old woman, the
memorial's custodian, sitting

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on the porch beneath the arbor,
sorting chickpeas from pebbles

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into her cast iron pot.

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See what her hands know.

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They are its breath, its mother
tongue, dividing, discarding.

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There is light playing over
the leaves, over her face,

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making her abstract, making
her quick and strange.

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But she has no care for what
speckles her, changing her.

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She is at her work.

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Oh, how we want to
be taken and changed,

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want to be mended
by what we enter.

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Is it thus with the world?

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Does it wish us to mend
it, light and dark,

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green and flesh?

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Will it be free then?

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I think the world is
a desperate element.

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It would have us
calm it, receive it.

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Therefore, this is what I
must ask you to imagine--

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wind; the moment
when the wind drops;

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and grapes, which are nothing,
which break in your hands."

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