Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

Anthony Doerr, a fiction writer from Boise, Idaho, his wife Shauna, and their six-month-old fraternal twin sons, Owen and Henry, flew to Rome after Doerr received a yearlong fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. An anonymous committee nominated him; Doerr received the acceptance letter while Shauna was still in the hospital, the twins only 12 hours old. The fellowship provided a writing studio, an apartment, and a modest stipend with no obligation beyond writing. The family settled into a two-bedroom apartment on the Janiculum Hill, a ridge above the neighborhood of Trastevere, with a wide terrace overlooking Rome's rooftops and domes.

The first days were disorienting. Jet lag kept everyone awake, and Doerr carried crying babies onto the terrace in the dark. Laura, an American neighbor whose husband was also a fellow, guided them to shops and markets. Doerr's Italian was almost nonexistent; at a bakery he could not place an order, and at a hardware store, unable to say "key ring," he accidentally bought a night-light. Romans stopped constantly to admire the twins, calling them gemellini, little twins.

Doerr's writing studio in the Academy palace was called the Tom Andrews Studio, named after a poet who had hemophilia and held the same fellowship before dying in 2002. The studio overlooked a magnificent umbrella pine. Doerr had brought 50 pages of a novel about the German occupation of a Normandy village between 1940 and 1944, but exhaustion stalled his progress. Among his books was a selection from Pliny the Elder's Natural History, a first-century Roman encyclopedic work spanning geography to zoology. Pliny increasingly captivated him, and he borrowed the complete edition from the Academy library. His novel languished while his journals overflowed with observations about Roman light and the taste of mozzarella.

The twins' early months had been grueling: Henry had been strapped to an apnea monitor, Owen had acid reflux, and Shauna breast-fed eight hours a day. Chronic insomnia followed Doerr to Rome. The family hired Tacy, a Filipina babysitter sending money home to a 14-year-old son she had not seen in two years. Doerr describes the twins' distinct temperaments: Blond Henry was calm, while darker-haired Owen was volatile and refused to sleep. Shauna and Doerr taped cardboard over bathroom windows to create Owen's makeshift dark bedroom.

Through the fall, Doerr absorbed Rome's layered history. He viewed a fragment of Augustus's 2,000-year-old sundial in a basement. He read about the rivalry between baroque architects Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini: Bernini died rich, while Borromini, an introverted genius, died by suicide nearly broke. He climbed the interior staircase of Trajan's Column, marveling at centuries-old graffiti. On Thanksgiving, he took the twins to the Protestant Cemetery to visit the grave of poet John Keats, feeling acutely that they were outsiders.

Winter brought new obsessions. Laura told them that seeing snowflakes drift through the oculus, the open circle at the top of the Pantheon's dome, would change their lives. Doerr visited the temple repeatedly, awed by its scale. He reflects on perception, drawing on Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky's concept of habitualization, the idea that routine deadens sensation, to argue that leaving home is the antidote. On a day off, Doerr and Shauna discovered Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, Borromini's geometrically complex church. One evening they ducked into St. Peter's Basilica and caught a glimpse of Pope John Paul II carried past in a chair. On Christmas Eve, they attended mass in a small Trastevere church.

The day after Christmas, all four fell ill, Owen's temperature climbing to 102 degrees. A tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed over 150,000 people; Doerr watched video clips of devastated villages, unable to stop. He reflects on fragility and scale, comparing human history's brevity to the age of the earth.

In January, Doerr flew to London for book promotion and to Amsterdam for the Dutch edition of his recently published novel, but he lay in hotel beds missing his family. The family rented a stone farmhouse in Umbria. Surrounded by quiet countryside, Doerr began writing fiction again for the first time since the twins were born, starting a short story about a village flooded by a dam. Back in Rome, teething caused relentless crying. On a day out, a coin-operated spotlight in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo illuminated Caravaggio's Crucifixion of Saint Peter, revealing the painter's masterful use of white against black.

Spring arrived fast. On March 4, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was released by kidnappers in Baghdad, but American soldiers fired on her car at a checkpoint, killing Italian security officer Nicola Calipari. Anti-American sentiment intensified in Rome. The twins turned one on March 18; the birthday toast went to Shauna, who had breast-fed approximately 1,040 hours that year. Pope John Paul II's health deteriorated visibly. On Palm Sunday he appeared at his window unable to speak. The pope died on April 2. Doerr stood in the piazza and thought of his sleeping sons a mile away.

Millions of mourners poured into Rome. Three nights later, Shauna collapsed at home, her neck tingling and splotches blooming on her throat. At the Regina Margherita hospital, Doerr's Italian failed him; an Italian friend translated. Doctors diagnosed dehydration and exhaustion compounded by an anxiety attack. The family received no bill. On April 8, Doerr attended the pope's funeral, squeezing across the Ponte Sant'Angelo with pilgrims. He estimated the crowd at 2 to 4 million.

Three days after the funeral, Henry took his first unaided steps. Owen followed seven days later. On April 19, the cardinals elected Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. Doerr loaded the twins into the stroller and raced to St. Peter's Square, where a cardinal declared "Habemus Papam" ("We have a pope") and the crowd roared so loudly the twins burst into tears. Shauna's medical tests came back clear. Every Wednesday the family visited Umbrian hill towns, exploring Giotto's frescoes in Assisi and carved marble on the Orvieto cathedral.

By mid-June, Rome was suffocating. Doerr finished his short story, 9,000 words written over nearly six months, the first fiction he had completed since the twins were born. He reflects on Rome's fountains as the city's circulatory system and catalogs its graffiti, from Viva Nixon near the Trevi Fountain to 2,000-year-old tags in the port of Ostia.

As departure approached, Doerr cleaned the studio and returned the last volume of Pliny to the library. Marco, a Roman father on crutches whom they had befriended, visited with his wife Lula and their new twins; Doerr and Shauna gave them hand-me-down baby clothes. They said goodbye to Tacy, whose son she had not seen in almost three years; all three cried. On his final morning, Doerr sat in the studio and mentally walked through the city to the Aventine Hill. He recalled peering through the keyhole of the Knights of Malta priory, a Catholic chivalric order, and seeing St. Peter's dome framed between hedges a mile away. He reflects that light is the one continuous thread through Rome's history, streaming 93 million miles to break against a wall, a cornice, a column. He acknowledges he never broke through the gates between himself and the Italians. He closed his notebook, walked down the hallway, and made for home, affirming the Italian saying "Roma, non basta una vita": One life is not enough (199).