Potatoes, cardinals and some spaghetti carbonara

On May 17, 1992, John Paul II beatified José María Escrivá de Balaguer, founder of Opus Dei, in San Pedro Square.

It was a spring Sunday, and after the ceremony Miguel was sitting on a terrace in the Campo di Fiori in the shade of an awning that cast a golden light over the plate of spaghetti carbonara.

Opposite stood the statue of Giordano Bruno and to one side of the square he could see the façade of one of the mansions that the Borgias inhabited, but after wandering his mind through all of history Miguel always returned to the plate of pasta.

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The art accompanied by potato omelette

Giordano Bruno had been sentenced to be burned at the stake for daring to say that the Earth was already in the sky, since it was revolving in space around the Sun. It was Pope Clement VIII who, given his refusal to retract, imposed the sentence of death with the addition of having his mouth sewn up with twine so that he could not blaspheme while burning.

It had happened right there a few meters away, despite which Miguel liked the spaghetti very well and during the digestion he remembered that the procession of mules with loads of gold had left Campo di Fiori that took Rodrigo de Borja to the Vatican to become Alexander VI.

He may have been a criminal, but it is to this pope that we owe

by Michelangelo and that Leonardo da Vinci designed the cannons for his son César Borgia.

For his part, he organized voluptuous parties in which he threw a handful of hazelnuts on the floor of the lodge and forced the Roman princesses to pick them up with their mouths on all fours.

The friar Savonarola did not stop incriminating him until Alexander VI got rid of him.

He first sentenced him to be hanged for heresy and then ordered his corpse to be burned in the middle of the Signoria square in Florence.

Miguel asked a waiter for a cappuccino and with the taste of cream and coffee on his lips he remembered what the Valencian Joan Fuster said: "At that time all the princes and popes were criminals, but ours were the most professional" .

Miguel had been sent to Rome to write the chronicle of the beatification of the founder of Opus.

The carabinieri had advised the Romans to go to the beach that Sunday since the city had been ceded to the Spanish, who had arrived in floods, most of them looking upper-middle class, highly educated, and their wives and daughters. very perfumed.

They had all passed the shops on Via Condotti the day before and then they were seen singing happy songs, the fields are dressed in colors in spring, on Via del Corso carrying big-brand bags in their hands.

At ten in the morning the ceremony had begun and Miguel, with his colleagues from the press, could contemplate from the top of the colonnade an extension of cardinals and prelates in red and purple, like a top-quality stew, that filled the square. of San Pedro.

The sun of Rome drew a cast iron from the flints and within it anyone could have fried a couple of eggs on the marble sandals of some evangelical giant that crowned the crest.

Then, the main door of the basilica was opened and there was a pharaonic impact.

A procession made up of acolytes appeared with the cross and the candelabra and two rows of hierarchies that were increasing in splendor and size to make way for the pharaoh.

With staff in hand, rhythmically, Pope John Paul II entered the scene and I don't think Amenhotep,

neither Xerxes nor Cyrus had the tables of this Pole.

The ceremony was dedicated to the son of a cloth vendor from Barbastro named Escrivá, one of whose relics, in this case, a tooth, was exhibited

on a silver tray while a four-voice hosanna from Palestrina sounded.

In reality, the beatification of Escrivá de Balaguer was an alibi that had served Miguel to go to Rome for another purpose.

Finally, after so many trips, this time he was able to find himself alone in a small room of the Doria-Pamphili palace before the portrait of Innocent X, painted by Velázquez.

All the art critics allude to the terrible eyes of this character;

instead, it seemed to Miguel that he was a terrified Barbary pirate before the devastating gaze of that damned painter who was taking his soul out.

Velázquez knew that the pope's fleshy mouth was due to the thousand roasts and thousand women that he had devoured;

his swollen nose was the product of the enormous amount of wine he had drunk and his grim frown indicated that he did not even believe in God.

Miguel wrote the chronicle of this trip to Rome under a spring sun,

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