"After dinner, we walked to midnight Mass at Santa Maria in Aracoeli to see the famed Gesu Bambino. It was a warm wet windy night. All the old cobblestones were gleaming, the river was wild and rushing, and everything was all lit up. In a tree by the Tiber, thousands of tiny birds crowded the branches, singing. We climbed a mountain of wet, slippery steps to the church and sat with a crowd of yuppified, bourgeois Roman families in the pews, all of us awaiting the Bambino. After the oddly cheesy, subdued Mass, he was finally released from his cabinet near the altar and grandly processed about the church. Brendan and I almost started giggling. He looked exactly like a dark, dried pineapple."
