Second street · Croisée

The mulberry laneVico Lungo del Gelso — laundry, wood smoke, and a name older than the quarter

Gelso is mulberry. Before the viceroy's architects drew their grid in the sixteenth century, this slope had mulberry trees on it, planted for silkworms — the leaves are what silkworms eat. The barracks went up, the trees went, and the name stayed, the way names do: on a street sign, meaning nothing to anyone, meaning everything if you ask. Vico Lungo del Gelso runs parallel to Via Toledo one block up the hill, and the people who live here call it the Via Toledo of the Quartieri.

It is the one lane in the grid you could walk without climbing, so it filled with what a level street fills with: pizzerias with the ovens toward the door, trattorias with four tables outside, little flags strung across between the balconies for no reason anyone remembers. At the corner with Vico Figurelle and Via Portacarrese, two street artists who sign Cyop&Kaf painted the first of some two hundred works they have left scattered through these streets — figures that look like they were drawn by a very serious child.

And the laundry. In my game it came in as "gouttière", the gutter, and I was wrong about the direction: the lines here do not run down the walls, they run across the lane, balcony to balcony, so that the sky is striped with other people's shirts. Everyone who has written about this quarter mentions it and I understand why now. It is a street that is lived in from the inside out — the private hung out over the public, and nobody minds. I am kept that way too: a room in Swedish, and everything else on a line.