The “Fly Eye Glasses” were flimsy plastic toy spectacles, large and cumbersome, badly made, too, with arms so weak they flopped around his ears as he tucked the ends carefully beneath his long jet-black hair in an effort to keep them firm on his face. Perhaps Giorgio was right. He was too old for toys like this. But Alessio Bramante was aware of what he had inherited from an archaeologist father, digging the past out of the ground, and an artist mother, whose paintings he admired but never quite understood. For him the world was, and always would be, intensely physicaclass="underline" a visual maze to be touched, examined, and explored, in as many different ways as he could find.
The glasses were supposed to let you witness reality the way a fly did. Their multifaceted eyes had lenses which were, in turn, hosts to many more lenses, hundreds perhaps, like kaleidoscopes without the flakes of coloured paper to get in the way, producing a universe of shifting views of the same scene, all the same, all different, all linked, all separate. Each thinking it was real and its neighbour imaginary, each, perhaps, living under the ultimate illusion, because Alessio Bramante was, he told himself, no fool. Everything he saw could be unreal. Every flower he touched, every breath he took, nothing more than a tiny fragment tumbling from someone else’s ever-changing dreams.
Crouched hard against the door, trying to ignore the firm, impatient voice of his father, Alessio was aware of another adult thought, one of many that kept popping into his head of late. This wasn’t just the fly’s view. It was that of God too. A distant, impersonal God, somewhere up in the sky, who could shift his line of vision just a millimetre, close one great eye, squint through another, and see His creations a myriad of different ways, trying better to understand them.
Alessio peered more intently and wondered: is this one world divided into many, or do we possess our own special vision, a faculty that, for reasons of kindness or convenience, he was unsure which, simplified the multitude into one?
Fanciful thoughts from an overimaginative, headstrong child.
He could hear his father repeating those words though they never slipped from his lips. Instead, Giorgio Bramante was saying something entirely different.
“Alessio,” he complained, half ordering, half pleading. “We have to go. Now.”
“Why?”
What did it matter if you were late? School went on forever. What were a few lost minutes when you were peering through a knights’ keyhole searching for the dome of St. Peter’s, trying to work out who was right, the humans or the flies?
“Because today’s not an ordinary day!”
Alessio took his eyes away from the keyhole, then, carefully, unwound the flimsy glasses from his face, and stuffed them into the pocket of his trousers.
“It isn’t?”
His father snatched a glance at his watch, which seemed unnecessary. Giorgio Bramante always knew the time. The minutes and seconds seemed to tick by in his head, always making their mark.
“There’s a meeting at the school. You can’t go in until ten thirty…”
“But…”
He could have stayed home and read and dreamed.
“But nothing!”
His father sounded a little tense and uncomfortable, with himself, not his son.
“So what are we going to do?”
Giorgio Bramante smiled. “Something new,” he said, smiling at a thought he had yet to share. “Something fun.”
Alessio was quiet, waiting.
“You do keep asking,” his father continued. “About the place I found.”
The boy’s breathing stopped for a moment. This was a secret. Bigger than anything glimpsed through a keyhole. He’d heard his father speaking in a whispered voice on the phone, noticed how many visitors kept coming to the house, and the way he was sent from the room the moment the grown-up talk began.
“Yes.” He paused, wondering what this all meant. “Please.”
“Well.” Giorgio Bramante hesitated, with a casual shrug, laughing at him in the way they both knew and recognised. “I can’t tell you.”
“Please!”
“No.” He shook his head firmly. “It’s too… important to tell. You have to see!”
Giorgio leaned down, grinning, tousling Alessio’s hair.
“Really?” the boy asked, when he could get a word out of his mouth.
“Really. And…” — he tapped his superfluous watch — “…now.”
“Oh,” Alessio whispered. All thoughts of Piranesi and his undiscovered tricks fled.
Giorgio Bramante leaned down farther and kissed him on the head, an unusual, unexpected gesture.
“Is it still there?” he asked idly, not really looking for an answer, taking Alessio’s small, strong arm, a man in a hurry, his son could see that straightaway.
“No,” he answered, not that his father was really listening anymore.
It simply didn’t exist, not in any of the hundreds of tiny, changing worlds Alessio had seen that morning. Michelangelo’s dome was hiding, lost somewhere in the mist across the river.
They were fifty metres beneath the red earth of the Aventino hill, slowly making their way along a narrow, meandering passageway cut into the soft rock almost twenty centuries before. The air was stale and noxious, heavy with damp and mould and the feral stink of unseen animals or birds. Even with their flashlights and the extra shoulder lanterns stolen from the storeroom, it was hard to see much ahead.
Ludo Torchia trembled a little. That was, he knew, simply because it was cold, a good ten degrees or more chillier below the surface, where, on that same warm June day, unknown to him, Alessio Bramante and his father now stood at the gate of the mansion of the Cavalieri di Malta, not half a kilometre away through the rock and soil above them.
Ludo should have expected the change in temperature. Dino Abati had. The young student from Turin wore the right clothes — a thick, waterproof, bright red industrial jumpsuit that clashed with his full head of curly ginger hair, heavy boots, ropes and equipment attached to his jacket — and now looked entirely at home in this man-made vein tunnelled by hand, every last, tortuous metre. The rest of them were beginners, in jeans and jackets, a couple even wearing sneakers. Aboveground Abati had scowled at them before they started work on the locks of the flimsy iron entrance gates.
Now, just twenty minutes in, their eyes still trying to acclimatise to the dark, Toni LaMarca was already starting to moan, whining in his high-pitched voice, its trilling notes rebounding off the roughly hacked stone walls just visible in their lights.
“Be quiet, Toni,” Torchia snapped at him.
“Remind me. Why exactly are we doing this?” LaMarca complained. “I’m freezing my nuts off already. What if we get caught? What about that, huh?”