"Well, he was closer to Rome, and to Veneto, and to the whole of Italy than any of your poets have been since, Mr Shelley and Lord Byron not excepted. England seems more and more to move away from Europe. Speaking of moving, do you feel yourself well enough to move by ferry and carrozza to the Cappella Sistina?"

"Not too much excitement," Dr Clark answered for John. "Let us no undo the salvatory work of the light diet. Fish. If there is to be dinner, let it be fish."

"Fish, yes. But Michelangelo before the fish," Gulielmi said.

"Michelangelo is unco' exciting." And Dr Clark fussed off to see other patients. Gulielmi hailed a carrozza on the Corso, telling the rogue of a driver to drive to the Porto de Ripetta ferry. John's supply of breath was not enough to sustain the skyboat of his enthusiasms. He tried to tell Gulielmi about the idea within himself that was trying to attain the first crude crudely workable shape, the – "Blobs of mercury – being brought together – by some helpful fingertip – to form the one – quicksilver disc -"

"Calm. You must be calm. It is good for you to be calm."

So John saved his breath and took in the Romans – workmen, carriers, barefoot child beggars skilled in adult obscenity: cazzo… coglioni… puttana… vafnculo. He would have to start reading hard. He would have to think of a stanza form. Blank verse, rhymed couplets, no. Terza rima? But that would seem like a mockery of Dante. The sonnet used as a stanza? That meant each phase of the story would thud or sweep or sidle in like a wave, then recoil. And why not? The octave for the public event, the sestet for the unchanging Marius or Mario. Unchanging, there was the rub. Could you really compose a lengthy poem about what never changed? His heart began to sink, and he recognised that, in a manner, his survival depended on the right burgeoning of this poetic idea. But to what category did the idea, would the poem, belong? Tragedy? Hardly, great men dying but a small man eternally remaining. Was he capable of it? It was some new thing, some category to be freshly invented. It was not the comic of Don Juan, not squibbish and irreverent. It was mightily reverent to this persistent Roman. Yet (heart dropping further, awareness of light flooding his eyes as his eyes further widened) what does Marius-Mario do but persist in living, begetting, working, owing rent, borrowing, drinking? He does not move, he does not generate a narrative.

They had been set down in the piazza of St Peter. "You look pale," Gulielmi said. "You need some grape spirit." And he led him, hand gently on his arm, to a wineshop off the square, cave-like, dusty, not warm.

"It tastes," John said, when he had sipped a little, "not unlike the way an old dog smells."

"It will do you no harm."

"I'm trying to bring to birth a long poem which shall somehow celebrate Rome. I'm disturbed by certain difficulties, and I cannot afford to be so disturbed, not now, not not now."

"Tell me the subject." Gulielmi looked grave as he listened.

"You see, for the first time in the history of poetry we have a common man, an ordinary soul – with Wordsworth you have peasants and shepherds but the poet imposes on them his own metaphysic. He pretends to present the speech of ordinary men, but does not. Here, through a common Roman -"

He stopped, in evident distress. Gulielmi waited. Then he said: "Go on."

"How could an Englishman do it? The ordinary speech of Romans is to be set down by Romans, not by Englishmen." The sudden distress seemed to make him thinner and smaller. He hunched over his little glass of grappa as to draw warmth from it. Gulielmi wished to say, but dared not: It is not for you, this thing is reserved for another. The muse presiding over this notion has hit the wrong season and the wrong poet. Aware of the depth the despondency could reach and of its danger, he said instead:

"Most fine notions begin in despair. This you must know. There is a whole wing of your mind's mansion unknown to you, where, as it were, work is already proceeding on your notion. A thousand clerks are scratching away. Or shall we imagine that it is the headquarters of a Grand Army of the poetic imagination, with some inner Napoleon plotting with his staff, maps spread, dividers calculating the day's march, while a whole corps awaits its orders. You must not think of this again, not with your brain of the daylight. Let us go and see Michelangelo."

John's face seemed to fill out again and the rose returned. He smiled, though ruefully, and let the last drop of dog-smelling grappa fall on to his tongue. He said:

"How old was Michelangelo when he died?"

"Ridiculously old. In his nineties and working till the end. But he felt he had learned nothing of his art. If he had lived to one hundred and ninety he would perhaps have felt the same."

"The life so short, the art so long to learn. I have done nothing."

"His very words. Come."

They entered the chapel by way of the Stradone dei Giardini. A guard responded to Gulielmi's triple knock and they were almost at once set upon by Michelangelo. It tired John to throw back his head, like a hen drinking, to be drowned by the muscular ceiling. He concentrated on the Last Judgment. "It is very fine," he said politely. "But not very Christian."

"It is a statement of Christian doctrine. Christ shall say to the wicked: Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire -"

"Yes, I know of that, Godless one as I am. But he also welcomes the blessed into everlasting bliss. Where are the blessed?"

"There you see them. There, you see, is the flayed Saint Bartholomew, and the skin he is holding is the skin of Michelangelo himself. You see the ghost of his face in the skin. That is very much a self-portrait."

"There are no signs of blessedness. It is all horror. All hell. Nor is that the Christ they teach of in the churches. Look at his great muscles. Look at his bearded ferocity. He is more Prometheus than Christ, except that he has no love of mankind. He does not bring us fire, he throws us into it. Where did he get those huge shoulder muscles? Not from a year or so of work in a carpenter's shop."

"San Bartolomeo," a voice said behind them. "Lui stesso." They turned. John saw a neat young swarthy man with one bigger and tougher, great-eyed, ebon-locked, mustachioed. This latter was carrying a sevenbranched candlestick, the seven flames dancing in unison to a breeze that wafted through the chapel. Gulielmi said:

"Belli. Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, poeta. John Keats, poeta." The two poets piacered each other warily. Belli was gorgeously decked in the flames of his candles, all gold and shadow and face-caves. Belli said:

"Don Valentino Llanos." A Spaniard, then. The Spaniard bowed. He said in very fair English:

"A poet from England? I am most happy." His aspirate had the swift throatiness of a jota. "Your name again, sir?"

"Keats."

"But I know your work," Llanos said in delight. " 'Much have I travelled in the realms of gold.' " A Spanish roundness in that gold, the jav and the trav true rhymes, a slack b quality in the v. And the much a truncated mucho. He, John Keats, had travelled to the realms of gold. "I study the poets of England. I am happier to meet a poet alive than a painter dead. I shall ever remember meeting Mr Keats under the Day of Judgment."

"Better under than on." He despised himself for the joke in the act of making it. "All Don Juans go the same way."

"But this is no true hell. It is as it were all pure energy with nothing of sin or judgment about it."

"I first saw it as terrifying, now as absurd. The painter has filled it with his own guilt. I can guess at the nature of the guilt, I think. He was too fond of broadshouldered boys."