More Confessions

If I didn't have anything serious to confess to in my last post, I do in this one.

I think I might have eaten egg this morning. In fact, I am almost positive I did. And the worst part is...I suspected there was some egg contamination after my first bite of the breakfast item in question, and I ate it anyway.

It happened like this: I got up for an early morning visit to Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the four major basilicas in Rome (yes, I'm still here). Even though tourists are delightfully thin on the ground in Rome right now, the major basilicas still manage to draw a critical mass of camera-snapping, backpack-wielding day trippers that make one's experience of a church less...churchy. So my plan was to give myself a quiet hour at Santa Maria at sunrise, and then find somewhere closeby for breakfast.

My planning paid off, and it was just the nuns and I who enjoyed the silence of the dimly lit Borghese chapel, their heads bowed in prayer and mine staring upwards at the 16-century coffered ceiling that is said to be gilded with Inca gold.

I was hungry when I exited into the Piazza dell'Esquilino, and (I should have foreseen this) was in no mood to vet out cafes for both good coffee and vegan-friendly breakfast. Good coffee was the number one priority, and I would have settled for an uninteresting panne of some sort to buffer my stomach until a market could be found. After trying three cafes and finding each to be lacking on one of these fronts, I found an establishment on the far side of the piazza, with a view back over Santa Maria's medieval bell tower. The coffee smelt good and there seemed to be an interesting selection of baked fruit things in the display fridge. I've mastered how to confirm that a pie or torte crust does not contain butter in Italian (senza burro, si?) and so I picked out what looked like an innocent apple and nut torte and ordered my coffee.

One bite later, and a faint alarm bell started ringing in a distant chamber of my mind. It hadn't occurred to me to check whether the filling had egg in it, and I could taste something that was faintly eggy. But I was hungry and undercaffeinated, and whether an egg was involved in the making of my overpriced slice of torte seemed like splitting hairs at that moment. And besides, I wasn't about to spit into a napkin in an upscale Roman cafe. So I swallowed my first bite, and having effectively crossed the Rubicon, I snuffed out the alarm bell, finished my torte and drank my coffee in a state of blissful denial.

The denial proved to have a limited shelf-life, and it was replaced by the inevitable weight of remorse in short order. I called to mind the lineup of confession boxes that I had just walked past in the main hall of Santa Maria's: I noted how some of the little red 'in-use' lights were on and I had thought to myself how pleasant it was that people confess their sins at such an early hour. Now I had something more serious to purge, and it wasn't even 9am. Would it matter that I have not been christened a Catholic? Would the gaping void in my Italian vocabulary for fessing up to sins leave me in a greater state of distress than I was currently feeling, staring at my empty coffee cup and plate like it was a crime scene, and I was the only suspect?

A cloud of shame followed me back to the hotel. After a morning of mental self-flagellation, I eventually settled on my own brand of repentance. Hence, today's post. I'm certain that if I can confess my sin to the public, I can resolve to forgive myself and move on. And I will run an extra set of intervals on the Spanish Steps tonight for good moral measure. I'm considering it my offering of Hail Mary's.