I wanted warmth, and so I sailed to Naples: the silver Bay, the Grotta Azzura, golden stone warm in the sun. Only to find that the Mediterranean in winter was piercingly cold and damp, colder in effect than my far northern land, for the citizenry seemed to have given no thought to the possibility—stunned into lassitude by the summer heat, maybe—and made no provision for chilling rains and the falling temperatures of rooms made of solid stone. Braziers and shutters, shawls and woolen socks, all rather ad lib. Maybe it won't last, they must think, summer will come back tomorrow. But it does last. And on the beach for weeks a sort of smelly thick seaweed was strewn each day, to be gathered for purposes I never learned, and replaced by more the next day: its sweetish rotten odor stayed with me for years. Never mind: I was Elsewhere! And the napoletani were as kind and importunate and brown and great-eyed and laughing, even as they shivered, as when the sun beat down. Which in the course of time it splendidly did again. But in that first winter, in the sweet loneliness of being truly adrift, I discovered the subject of a book, and the possibility within myself that I might write it. I discovered, in the Dominican abbey where it was his misfortune and his fate to have been immured, the philosopher and heretic Giordano Bruno (but he was a young man then, no more than a boy really, from the suburb of Nola). It was another solitary fellow, himself adrift, a scholar and antiquarian, who told me of Bruno and his story, and offered himself as guide to the Neapolitan places associated with him; it was he who showed me the cell where Bruno lived and thought, who took me to the church where he said his first mass, and the mountain beneath whose beetle he was born. Nor was that all I learned, and have learned later, from him. We were inseparable: an Anglo-French scholar, a young Nolan monk, and I; and we have continued to be, in shifting and altered ways, ever since.

Pierce looked to the bottom of the page, and to the back of the book, but the note that gave this Anglo-French, or imaginary, scholar's name—the note that Pierce only half believed he would find, really, the absolutely impossible last straw—wasn't there; and despite what was averred concerning him, the fellow vanished from the book in the very next paragraph: When Bruno was summoned to Rome, never to return to Naples, I went as well, and our trio was dissolved.

In Kraft's story it was his mastery of the Art of Memory, for which the Dominicans were well known, that first brought Bruno to Rome. Summoned thence by the Dominican cardinals around the pope to show off his powers. That's certainly what he told the inquisitors in Venice. Whether or not he was ever really in Rome before he ran away, he was for sure here at the end, when for mad reasons of his own he came back, back from Protestant Frankfurt to Italy, apparently with plans to lay before the pope: a new ancient way of reforming and improving all human activity, and incidentally a new picture of the cosmos as well. Soon after he reached Venice he was arrested; after long interrogations, the Venetians turned him over (rather reluctantly) to Rome.

Frankfurt—Zurich—Milan—Genoa—Livorno—Rome. For a week Pierce wandered backward along the way that Bruno had at first taken fleeing from Rome and his order. In Kraft's story—not the book Bruno's Journey, but his big last unfinished novel—Bruno is warned by a young man who comes to him to tell him that proceedings in the Holy Office have begun against him. A young man who seems to know him seems also to know of a network of brothers who will take in the young runaway, keep him from the Inquisition, feed him and hide him and send him on to the next, a sort of heretics’ Underground Railway that, for all Pierce knew, really existed, though this one of Kraft's seemed to come into existence only because Bruno himself proceeded along it: finding, at every stop, that sign that John Dee had made or discovered. He found it in books, on the signet rings of kindly helpers, in John Dee's own house in England, and in the center of Rudolf's palace in Prague, where Dee drew it with his staff on the stones of the floor. The center of the center of the empire at the center of the world. There for a moment the two stood together.

In Kraft's story.

But if Kraft could draw the young monk on, and give him shelter, refashion the world he went in, why did he then send him back, along the wrong ways, the fatal ways? Why couldn't he grant him the power to escape? What on earth was the point of writing a huge tragicomic epic full of powers and possibilities if it couldn't rescue him or anyone?

It was late afternoon when Pierce left the somewhat prisonlike pensione he had found in an anonymous part of town. His shoulders still felt the bags they had carried, but he didn't feel he could eat, or sleep. He thought of his father, Axel, and how he had promised, when he was just a kid, to bring Axel here one day, when he was grown up; here where Western Civilization lay cradled. He set out to find the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, first stop on his list, double starred in Kraft's guidebook. It seemed to be not far away.

Before long he didn't know where he was exactly. European street names (he had only at length learned this, probably you were supposed to be born knowing) were not put up on posts on the street but stuck to the corner buildings’ walls. Ill lit and ancient, most of them. He opened the guidebook in the streetlight, and tried to make sense of the finely printed little tissue-paper maps, tangled spaghetti of ancient streets stamped with coffin-shaped or cross-shaped churches. He turned, turned back. That vast dark-domed bulk there, an obelisk rising before it: surely that should be a landmark, even in a city made of them. He should try to find the Pantheon, right around here somewhere, and from there he might follow these instructions backward to the place he sought.

Leaving the Piazza de Rotonda we follow the Via dei Cestari along the west side of the Piazza della Minerva. We will stop there to study the grand Bernini monument, which legend has it was inspired by a pair of ponderous pachyderms that visited Rome with a circus, where they attracted the attention of the greatest of all Baroque sculptors, Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini. In a neighborhood rich in obelisks—the obelisk of Psametticus, which we passed in the Piazza de Montecitorio; the obelisk of Rameses II, rising before the Pantheon—the one borne on an elephant's back in the Piazza della Minerva is the most beloved.

It had already begun to grow dark; the frantic crowds of careening vehicles in the streets, though oblivious of foot traffic or signals, had turned on their lights; Pierce was, he recalled, still in the Northern Hemisphere, in fact at about the same latitude as the Faraway Hills from which he had come, where it was also darkening now to a winter night. He walked on. There was no piazza, no elephant, no Via dei Cestari. He went into a café. It was apparently not the hour for coffee; the beautiful bright bar was empty. With its cellophane-wrapped boxes of chocolates and biscotti, its alchemist's row of colored bottles, its shiny steel counter and great angel-surmounted shrine-like machine, it was exactly like the hundreds of others he passed or drank in, one on almost every corner, enough for every Roman in the streets to rush into at once when necessary, to toss down a miniature coffee and be off again. He asked for a whisky. Sit Down, Sorrow was in his bag, and he fished it out.

The idea that Bernini was inspired to make an elephant by an actual famous elephant, a sort of Roman Jumbo, is inadequate. The absurd but compelling idea of an elephant that bears on his back a granite obelisk actually derives from Francesco Colonna's 1499 novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. As Colonna's eponymous hero Poliphilus wanders in a hortus conclusus, fast asleep and in search of love, he comes upon a great marble elephant with an obelisk on his back. Within the hollow elephant (Poliphilus finds a door to go in by) lie the corpses or images of a naked man and woman, Sponsus and Sponsa, Matter and Form. The Rosicrucians would later make much of these weird allegories.