Sul Tetto del Duomo

If you have ever been to an international scientific conference you will know what I mean when I say it is a circus, a travelling show. Only this show—in Karlsruhe, London or Toronto today, Amsterdam, Austin or Moscow tomorrow—has no audience. The clowns, the jugglers and the acrobats strut and caper for no-one but their fellow performers. Round and round the world they go, thrilling and amusing each other with just the occasional visit home—to Limerick or Palo Alto or Nottingham—to renew acquaintance with their families and to think up some new material for their act.

That particular week in early September, my own troupe of wandering scientists had hit upon Milan and, on the high-tech stage of the University's aula magna by ones and twos we entertained each other with slide-shows, video shows, computer graphics and good, old-fashioned stand-up routines. In the evenings, the mutual applause continued in bars and restaurants across the city.

By Thursday lunchtime I'd had as much as I could take of it and needed to be alone. One more Distillation of Universal Truth and I would scream. One more Insightful Reworking and I would hit somebody. I shuffled along a row of seated colleagues who swung or lifted their knees as I passed and I was free.

Milan is probably the noisiest place I know. Put any two Italians together and set them off in polite conversation and you get a noise which, to my delicate English ears, is something like a couple of auctioneers trying to shout each other down. If you cram a million of them into a few square kilometres, stir in ten thousand honking cars, another ten thousand revving motorbikes and a scattering of yapping dogs, you've got Milan. There's a lot of life there but, if you want to sleep, you'd do better to cross the Alps into Switzerland.

Fending off the black guys selling cigarettes and other junk, dodging the cars and motorbikes that would sooner see me dead than let me set foot on a Milanese road, I made my way to the throbbing heart of that throbbing city; la Piazza del Duomo. This is a vast paved area surrounded by tourist shops, blasted by the sun, even in September, and carpeted wall to wall in people and pigeons. The pigeons are all scruffy, dark grey town birds that would take your hand off for a grain of corn. The people, though, are a mixed and splendid bunch of allsorts. As I made my way across the square I encountered every variety of person you might expect there; Japanese ladies smothered in smiles and pigeons being photographed by dour Italian men, Milanese teenagers by the score, priests in black frocks, American teenagers with video cameras, Italian families on day trips, nuns of every order, children squealing and trying to trample the pigeons, and me, a renegade from my chosen profession, looking for the impossible, a place of peace and solitude in this ants'-nest of a city.

The cathedral in Milan, Il Duomo, dominates the piazza that takes its name with an authority that only the immensely huge possess. I stared at it in open-mouthed disbelief. It isn't that it's the most beautiful building that I'd ever seen, or, despite its towering, soaring magnificence, the largest. No, Il Duomo di Milano is, by a long, long way the most excessively over-ornate building in this wide world of amazing, baroque nonsenses.

Every inch of its monstrous façade was covered in carving. Figures by the thousand wept or died or struggled or fought their way across those acres of white stone. Christ, in a hundred manifestations, preached or made miracles before the upturned faces of apostles. Saints burned or blessed, hung or harangued in every nook and cranny. Monsters teased and tormented, forked tongues lashing in fanged mouths. Snakes coiled, lions sprang, vines twined and archbishops stood in their recesses, hands pressed together, eyes turned to Heaven, praying, no doubt, for deliverance from this Bedlam they have found themselves in, this Catholic nightmare fantasy that came raging from the twisted mind of some ancient, pious madman and is now caught in this froth of stone forever.

I walked around the thing in a daze of amazement and delight. Bas-relief frescoes mounted to vaulting windows, huge columns with scrolls and flowers and giants in poses of purest melodrama mounted to friezes and balustrades. Flying buttresses carried the ornamentation higher, then higher still and, from everywhere on high, the white stone erupted in dizzying crenelated spikes, pushing up and up to balance man-sized statues on impossibly long, slim fingers, holding them against the bluest blue sky, hundreds of feet in the air.

Imagine my delight, then, when I came across a door marked "Ascensore" and "a Pedone" with little pictures of lift and a stick person climbing the stairs. It was an access to the roof of this marvel. Pausing only to give large quantities of lire to the uniformed man snoozing beside the turnstile, I made my way up flight after flight of stone steps. Hot, panting, dripping with sweat, I finally emerged into the sunlight.

The roof of Il Duomo is made of marble. At the very top, the roof of the nave runs, as broad as a three lane marble motorway, between elaborate stone screens for a hundred metres to a tower or rather a tower of towers, an enormous wedding cake of spires and spirals big enough to be a cathedral on its own and so spectacularly high and fancy as to take your breath away, yet again, even though you've passed through every wonder imaginable to reach that point. All over the roof and up and down the tower are people. Mostly, they are just wandering about, trying to take in the spectacle they find themselves in. Now and then a girl will strike a pose and her boyfriend will make a big production of photographing her in this perfect setting. On steps and walls, people sit in the shade or even in the hot sun, exhausted by a day's sightseeing or maybe just wanting to linger in this strange, fantastic place.

I looked the roof over but I'd seen what I was looking for at a lower level. The roof of Il Duomo is on several levels and all connected by an elaborate criss -crossing of stone staircases and pathways. Had M C Escher ever been to Milan? I imagined his giant lizards marching and rolling up and up and around and up the endless stairways where the endless tourists now marched. Down on a lower level, a path ran along a narrower stretch of roof—perhaps only ten metres wide—passing through doorways as it made its way along the length of the nave, each doorway tunnelled through the arm of a massive flying buttress.

The buttresses broke this lower run of roof into ten metre squares. The marble floor of each square sloped up to the massive wall of the church and a huge, stained glass window and each sloped down to the path and a balustrade and a dizzy tumble of ornament to yet lower levels of the roof and empty space beyond. Back up against the wall and the window is where I wanted to be. No one was there. Each square was empty except for the occasional passer-by on the path at its base. These were not proper places to sit or idle. Just passing places. I could be alone here.

So I sat with my back to the great church and my gaze facing the blue sky of Milan and waited while my thoughts gathered and settled like a flock of pigeons.

Three loud Italian businessmen passed below me. One, with a bald head and a bright green jacket, was shouting into a mobile phone. He seemed very agitated. Another turned to him and offered him a calculator from his shirt pocket. The first waved it away angrily, still shouting, and, as if to explain, pointed at the phone and made a rude sign that needed no translation.

As they passed out of sight, two American women appeared. Both were dressed in black "pant suits" but while one was blond and slim and attractive and lethargic, her friend was dark and fat and unattractive and full of energy. The fat one appeared first. She had a camera and was snapping everything indiscriminately. She rushed over to the balustrade and pointed out one of the many statues on pillars as the blond appeared. "Over here!", she shouted. "Get a load of this cute li'l fella!" The blond glanced, straight-faced at the statue, then at me and slouched off along the path with the fat woman skipping and dodging around her, snapping at everything until they were gone.

I took a notebook out of the bag I was carrying and began to sketch the ornamentation on the pillars and buttresses. A Japanese family began to appear, an old couple, a young couple and a teenage girl. Three generations. I noticed that the Japanese family were smiling in surprise and wonder at this great folly, the way that no-one else whom I'd seen had done. I was grateful to them for sharing my delight. The young girl was beautiful, slim, elegant. She wore yellow and could have been a fairy princess as she wondered across that enchanted rooftop. She should have had wings and silver motes should have filled the air about her. I sketched her like that, pleased at the delicate fineness of her fingers and the brightness of her eyes. Before I had finished, they were gone.

I conceived a painting; "The Roof of Il Duomo". It would be a long canvass and through a forest of white pillars, each topped with a Roman patriarch, whose faces caricatured my oh-so-serious scientific colleagues, would wind a procession of fantastic creatures, mythical beings and fabulous animals, each one based on one of these passing tourists. Yes. There! Even as the idea formed, a fat Italian clumped trough the door onto the path. He wielded a heavy video camera like a bazooka and scowled, scowled into it as though he wanted to blast the silly, frivolous stonework to pieces. He scowled at me and my pencil caught the sharp arch of his black eyebrows, the jowly droop of his thin mouth. Pluto, I thought. King of the Underworld.

A crowd of youngsters arrived and sat down on the roof. They were flushed and panting still from the climb. A couple of them went to lean over the balustrade. They jostled and giggled and I made them pixies and elves.

A pleasant rhythm established itself as the visitors passed by and I sketched them. Three tall German youths with printed tee-shirts and black sun glasses, looking the Duomo over in cool disdain, as though they were considering buying it. Two French girls dressed strangely dowdily; one of them carrying a raincoat. Lots of young Italian couples: skinny, olive-skinned boys and curvaceous, slinky girls. I remembered places like Il Duomo from my own youth. Safe, interesting, cheap places, where you could take your girlfriend for a bit of an outing, something a bit different, romantic even. I smiled at my memories and felt a new affection for the youngsters sauntering past.

But remembering my youth had been a mistake. My mind turned now on tired old wheels, ran down deep, rutted tracks. Inch by inch, mile by mile, it followed all the ways that had led me to that moment on the roof in that alien city. I could not go back to the conference. The thought of being there filled me with a kind of panic, a wild urge to run , escape. I remembered the meal we had all had the previous evening and despised myself for being sociable and polite to those junketing ego-monsters. Year by year, such people had taken my naïve belief in science as a fine and noble endeavour and stripped it down to the essential reality of a table full of social-inadequates stuffing their faces at the expense of ignorant tax-payers. That morning I had listened to these same people giving their papers, presenting their research, and thought how sad it was that their introverted maunderings passed for theoretical development, that their personal opinions passed for observation and analysis, and that the best they could do was so far away from what might truly be called understanding that they might as well not have bothered and so saved all those tax-payers all that money.

And, like them, I'd taken the fat salary and the kudos and the perks and built a career and a reputation on the barest minimum of contribution. Now, at 40, heartily sick of it all, I was trapped and desperate. It's a cliché to say that families and mortgages and commitments can bind you to a life you never wanted. Yet behind this, is the wife who trusts you to go on being who she thinks you are and the little girl who maybe doesn't need the nice house and the garden but whom it would break your heart to think of living in a pokey little flat somewhere.

I looked down at my sketches. They were good. Not brilliant, but good. I'd sold a few over the years and dreamed of turning professional, making a living. Sometimes, it really seemed possible. Here on this roof, it almost seemed possible. The people going by. So much material!

A woman walked by on her own. She wore a pink skirt unfashionably long and a brown cardigan. Her long, thick, dark, frizzy hair was gathered in a pink ribbon. She had black tights and flat, black shoes and thick-rimmed glasses and would have been the dullest stereotype of a mousy librarian were it not for her strikingly beautiful face with its noble, strong bone structure, full, sensuous mouth and huge deep black eyes. Why! I could paint that face and I wouldn't even have to be good. People would buy that face for its beauty alone. But, if I could paint it well...!

Two black girls go by like an after-image of the two American women. One is slim and beautiful. The other is fat and has a squidgy face. Their clothes are bright, dazzling, and I watch the slim one who moves like an animal, strong and supple. Her buttocks flow beneath a stretched-tight skirt, driven by long-muscled legs. A lone Japanese man goes past on his way down, walking fast, looking like he'd finished one thing and was on his way to do the next. All these lives! I feel adrift. Rudderless. An American couple comes by. The fat man poses under a carving of fauns and fruit and his fat wife takes his picture. Then they move on and I am left spinning in their wake. It seems as though no-one in the world has doubt or uncertainty but me. No-one else is lost or purposeless.

I put down my sketchpad and leaned back against the stone. The stone felt solid but I was not fooled. This rock I leaned on felt like the side of a mountain but I knew it was just the eggshell skin on a huge, empty space, an enormous, man-made volume of air, impressive in its mad extravagance. Out there, sitting on that membrane, the evidence of the insubstantiality of stone bludgeoned the senses. High as I was, columns rose twenty more metres into the air and balanced the feather weight of great statues. All down the columns, the stone was teased and tweaked into endless swirls and knobs, with rings of smaller statues round them and rings of yet smaller statues within them—some so well hidden that only God and the pigeons could see them. Head-sized knobs on ripples of white stone marched up and down the endless buttresses. Each knob carved with a face—man, woman, lion, devil—or a flower, or a symbol from some forgotten codex and on some the faces and the foliage blended, harking back to older, simpler religions, and there—a little joke perhaps—a smiling sun and a grimacing moon. Even stone, even good, solid stone, is just stuff for our imaginations to play with. Even the rock of the Earth.

I was tired. A dull depression was draining me. I noticed that a handsome, grey-haired woman, smartly dressed and well-coiffured, was staring at me from a distance. When I looked straight at her, she looked away and moved on. I remembered that many people had looked at me as they had passed. One large German woman had even photographed me as though I was part of the spectacle. Local colour.

It was time to go. I put my sketches away in my bag, knowing I would never paint "The Roof of Il Duomo". It had been an interlude. An escape. A moment of being someone I might have been but was not. Tomorrow I would go back to the conference to be who I had to be.