It’s rare for me to visit Europe twice in one summer, but this has been a remarkable year. Following my trip in May to London and Paris, I returned to Italy earlier this month, starting the trip in one of my favorite cities: Rome.
I love Rome. Between The Key to the Abyss and The Cauldron of God, 48 chapters of my trilogy of novels take place in the medieval version of that city. As soon as I arrived at my hotel in the Piazza di Paradiso, I felt the urge to explore all the places my characters had gone before. Fortunately, my wife, daughter, and her boyfriend were good sports about it and joined me on my journey.
Piazza Navona
Our first stop was Piazza Navona, the famous plaza where Bernini built his most magnificent fountain—the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi—crowned by an Egyptian obelisk. The plaza is shaped like a chariot track because it was built on the site of the ancient Stadium of Domitian. As I sipped a cappuccino at a café on the piazza, I could imagine the possessed Ugo Grassus and his horsemen cantering through the ruins of that ancient stadium on their way to the hideout of the Brotherhood of the Messiah:
The horsemen reached the ruins of the Stadium of Domitian two hours before sunrise. A lone cat stalked quietly across the field in the center of the crumbling stadium, whose entire south end had collapsed, ravaged by time. Heading towards the shadowy warrens at the north end of the stadium, the riders entered the arena. The warrens beneath the old stadium were haunted by prostitutes and beggars, but they also served as the hideout for the Brotherhood of the Messiah. The cult had moved here three months ago after the pope’s soldiers raided their former hideaway in the ruins of Trajan’s Market. While many in the brotherhood were religious fanatics desperate to place an Italian pope on Saint Peter’s throne, more than a few were unscrupulous men like Ugo Grassus—conmen, thieves, and scoundrels—all under the influence of Naberus da Roma. Yet today, those men would serve the Dragon.
From “The Horsemen” – Chapter 12 of The Cauldron of God.
Castle Sant’Angelo
From Piazza Navona, we headed toward the Tiber River and the Bridge of Angels. There, I laid eyes on one of my favorite structures in all of Rome: Castel Sant’Angelo. The second act of The Key to the Abyss begins with the famous siege of that castle by the seventeen-year-old Otto III, who sought to capture it from his archenemy Crescentius II. From the riverbank, I could imagine what Ciarán and Khalil would have seen when they approached the castle for the first time.
As he rowed past the thick Leonine Walls, where the river bent to the northeast, Ciarán’s jaw dropped. For within the walls stood the largest castle he had ever seen. Circular in shape and surrounded by a fortified curtain wall, the hulking structure towered above the city, and atop its crenelated battlements a huge standard of a marble horse fluttered in the breeze.
Yet surrounding the castle stood a veritable forest of siege engines.
From “The Eternal City” – Chapter 7 to The Key to the Abyss.
Otto’s siege was the first time in history that the castle (which was once the Mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian) was ever captured. As I crossed the Bridge of Angels, I could look up at the terrace where Otto and his cousin, Pope Gregory V, executed Crescentius in front of his lover, Theodora, which sparked her tragic quest for vengeance that ends in The Cauldron of God.
The Piazza Della Rotunda
For lunch that day, we stopped at my favorite pizza place in Rome, La Sacrestia Ristorante, on a side street off the Piazza Della Rotunda, home of the Pantheon, known then as the Basilica of Santa Maria Rotunda. For a brief minute, I could imagine Cardinal Bishop Beno accusing young Tara of witchcraft and Alais entering the plaza, about to stop him.
She veered down a crooked street that ended in the small plaza in front of the Convent of Minerva. From beyond the convent and the curved dome of the Basilica of Santa Maria Rotunda rose a narrow plume of smoke that caused her stomach to harden like a rock. Alais kicked her mare forward, but it slowed around the corner, its hooves clacking on the flagstones. A crowd of people had gathered in the plaza outside the basilica. From her saddle, Alais could see that many in the crowd were nuns dressed in their Basilian habits, but others were priests and monks mixed with shopkeepers, merchants, housewives, and even children. They gathered around a pyre in the plaza’s center. A tall wooden stake jutted from the smoking kindling, and Alais gulped down a breath when she looked upon the girl tied to the post.
From “The Sorceress of Rome” – Chapter 5 of The Cauldron of God.
From the plaza, we rounded the corner to the Piazza della Minerva, home of the convent of Minerva where Tara was raised as a child. It’s also the site of her harrowing rescue by Ciarán, Alais, Holger, and a very angry Breda.
The Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran
After a wonderful dinner and some grappa on the hotel’s rooftop bar, we got some sleep and prepared for the next day’s adventures. It began at the Lateran Palace and the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran. While I had been to Rome three times before, I had never visited there. And even though so many chapters in The Key to the Abyss and The Cauldron of God take place there, the structure that existed in 999 A.D. burned down in the fourteenth century, so I saw no need to go there on my earlier trips.
This time, however, I found a reason to visit after learning that Pietro Buccaporci (Peter Pig’s snout) was buried in the archbasilica after becoming Pope Sergius IV. Pietro is one of my favorite characters in The Cauldron of God, so I felt it appropriate to visit his tomb and pay my respects. As an added bonus, Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Silvester II and is one of the most important characters in my trilogy, is also entombed in the archbasilica. Unfortunately, his tomb is less accessible than Pietro’s. But I enjoyed my visit there nonetheless.
The Theatre of Pompey
The next twist on my trip took me to a place I never expected to go—the ruins of the Theatre of Pompey, where the second act of The Cauldron of God and the trial by combat begin. The Theatre of Pompey, where Julius Caesar was assassinated, was destroyed ages ago. I even fictionally portrayed its destruction in The Cauldron of God. So, it was the last place I thought I’d ever find myself. But I did, thanks to the need for air conditioning.
Rome was extremely hot, with temperatures in the high 90s. So, after our trek to the Lateran Palace, we needed a cool place to have lunch. Thanks to ChatGPT, we found an air-conditioned restaurant close to our hotel called the Hostaria Costanza. You can imagine my utter surprise when I discovered the restaurant is inside the only remaining part of the ancient Theatre of Pompey. In fact, their menu even shows the old theatre’s layout and the restaurant’s exact location.
The space depicted on the menu brought back so many memories of that once-glorious structure from the third book of my trilogy.
They entered onto a wide brick path framed on the right by the broken pillars and the collapsed wall of the ruined structure that once stood between the theatre and the garden. To the left, the path stepped down to a vast semicircle of broken flagstones choked with weeds, which Ciarán suspected once served as the theatre’s stage. At the northmost end stood Cardinal Bishop Beno, dressed in his scarlet robes and skullcap. His eyes widened as he saw Alais surrounded by Lindworm’s fierce-looking crew, though beside him, Gundoald looked on with a steely gaze. The burly Lombard stood head and shoulders above Beno, peering from a pointed helm with curved cheekpieces and topped with a horsehair plume. Gundoald’s chainmail tunic was polished to a silvery shine, and his round shield, painted sky blue with a thick iron boss, bore a stylized image of a white horse. The image reminded Ciarán of the colossal statues of the Horse Tamers and something Pietro had told him: Beno was a kinsman of Crescentius of the Marble Horse.
Ciarán pulled his gaze away from Gundoald and stared into the amphitheater filled with rows of benches. A twenty-foot-wide stairway climbed up the theatre to the temple-like structure behind the stands, splitting the seating area into two sections. Beno’s faction crowded in the northern section, while the benches in the southernmost section closest to the floor had been reserved for the pope and his entourage. Gerbert was already seated beside Niccolo and flanked by two ranks of guardsmen. When his eyes met Ciarán’s, the pope gave an approving nod.
From “Judgment Day” – Chapter 13 of The Cauldron of God.
Sitting inside that marvelous restaurant with its ancient brick walls, enjoying the house wine and some of the best grilled tuna and linguine and clams I had ever had, I could not believe I was less than fifty yards from where Alais found herself in the underbelly of the theatre.
The gust cleared the dusty haze, leaving only motes of powdered stone drifting through the air. The theatre’s underbelly was a warren of broken archways and ruined stone filled with shadows. Seven paces away, the horseman who had invoked the power lay half-buried under huge chunks of rubble, not far from his dead stallion. The man moved his head, but he looked dazed.
Alais could not imagine a horseman had knowledge of the Fae arts. There was more here than met the eye. With a word—“Eoh”—the palms of her hands flared with bluish light, which she scattered across the wreckage like an inferno of Saint Elmo’s fire. In the light, she saw the demon’s true form enveloping the horseman. It was a brutish thing, with a grotesquely prominent forehead, vulgar lips, and teeth filed to points. Overlaying the horseman’s eyes, the demon’s orbs glowed like hot coals.
From “Demons’ Fury” – Chapter 15 of The Cauldron of God.
While I was drinking all of this in—and more of the house wine—I got a phone call from my brother-in-law (who we were supposed to meet with the rest of our family in Praiano, on the Amalfi Coast) that became the biggest twist of the entire trip. Plans had changed. He and his wife would now meet us tomorrow in Rome—where we would go to the Vatican for a service with the pope.
The Basilica of Saint Peter
I had been to the Vatican three times before, but I had never entered the Basilica of Saint Peter through a private entrance in the transept that leads straight to the magnificent altar covered by the bronze canopy Bernini built. But I did that day, and soon, my family and I sat in the third row at a service presided over by Pope Leo XIV.
This was the first service of its kind the pope had held inside the basilica (or so we were told by staff members of the U.S. embassy to the Vatican), and it was an honor to be there. Even more, it was followed by a private tour of the Apostolic Palace that ended with a tour of a then-empty Saint Peter’s Basilica.
Near the end of our tour, I walked by a huge plaque that listed all the popes buried at Saint Peter’s. At the top is Saint Peter himself, and behind the altar in the basilica, we found the stairway that eventually led down to his tomb in the necropolis beneath the structure. It was there that Gerbert took Ciarán, Alais, and Pietro down to Saint Peter’s tomb in their search for the Fifth Seal in The Cauldron of God.
The basilica was the largest church Ciarán had ever set foot in, but he had never done so during nighttime. Gerbert’s oil lamp barely pierced the darkness inside the vast nave, and the many shrines and mosaics that adorned the nave’s walls were lost within the shadows beyond the towering columns that ran down each side of the central aisle. A hint of incense lingered in the air, and the basilica was deathly quiet, save for their footfalls echoing through the nave.
When they were halfway down the aisle, Gerbert’s lamplight caught the twisted columns of gray marble that supported the silver canopy above the altar in the basilica’s chancel. Those columns, Ciarán knew, once stood in Solomon’s temple before Emperor Constantine brought them from Jerusalem, and their spiraling shape had been mimicked in the ornate scroll case that held the Testament of Solomon. As the lamplight washed over the marble altar, Ciarán wondered if whatever lay beneath it was also one of Solomon’s creations.
“How do we get beneath the altar?” Alais asked. “It looks far too massive to move.”
“There’s a hidden stairwell in the back of the chancel,” Gerbert replied. “Saint Peter was martyred in the Circus of Nero at the base of the Vatican Hill. Beneath the hill was a Roman necropolis—a city of the dead—where the early Christians entombed the saint. When Constantine built the basilica in 326, he constructed it on top of the necropolis, immaculately designed so that the altar stood precisely above Saint Peter’s tomb. Fortunately, the emperor preserved the entrance to the necropolis, though Pope Sylvester thought it best to conceal it, which is why the tomb was not desecrated by the Visigoths, Huns, and Saracens during the various times they sacked the city.”
From “The Fifth Seal” – Chapter 20 of The Cauldron of God.
While it was cool to stand above Saint Peter’s tomb, the name on the plaque of the pope entombed in 999 was more important to my novels: Gregory V. Pope Gregory is a major character in The Key to the Abyss, and by the end of that trip, I had stood in the resting place of all three popes featured in my novels and seen the current pope, too. It was a truly amazing day, but it wasn’t over yet.
The Amalfi Coast
After our adventure in Saint Peter’s, we headed to the Amalfi Coast, where we met the rest of our family in Praiano. The villa where we stayed sat on a cliff overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, with an outstanding view of Positano and the island of Capri. Ciarán and Alais, along with Tara, Pietro, and Lindworm’s crew, would have passed the cliffs where our villa stood on their way to find the Varangian.
The jarl would often keep the ship just miles from shore, so the coastline was always in view. At times, they would visit cities along the coast to spend the night and replenish supplies, including a fortified town named Gaeta and a massive walled city called Naples, with a prominent lighthouse and a formidable castle. Each time, the crew would remove the dragonhead from Lindworm’s prow before nearing a town or city so as not to alarm the citizenry into believing that Viking raiders had arrived at their shore. Tara was beginning to enjoy these brief visits to the settlements along the Italian coast. But after spending a night at Amalfi, another walled town built on a steep cliffside, Jarl Holger began to keep Lindworm farther away from the shore.
From “Lindworm” – Chapter 30 of The Cauldron of God.
If I ever want to see the place where the Varangian had his fortress, I’ll need to plan a trip to Sicily, which remains on my bucket list. I’d also like to travel the Greek Isles and approach Istanbul (Constantinople) from the sea, just like Lindworm did. But those adventures are for another day.
For now, I’ll cherish the memories of my incredible journey to Rome. It almost makes me want to write a sequel.
* Map of medieval Rome by Jeff Mathison from The Key to the Abyss