December 14, 2020
Under the buildings— tufted clay, / Like tennis courts upended—runs the subway of Rome. I have been riding it for 36 years, on weekdays, to get to my workplace: a public health institute early on, a research hospital since the new millennium. The trip is 25 to 35 minutes, passing through 12 stations, and usually after a couple of stops I get to sit down. That’s when I can open my poetry books and the notebooks in which I translate them, while men and women come and go talking of the froz...