In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

dainty Parisian heels like the runway pro she was. Unlike Paris, the
buildings here were not buffed clean but still layered with black
industrial and pre-industrial grime, except at shoulder level where
human and animal had worn them to an oily, dun colored sheen.
Winding round these dark walls with their rodent fur covered
navigator, the helmeted Ula, and an abysmal Sandro, Penny felt more
like a character in Kafka than any in Roman Holiday.
The party found themselves in a long piazza built around
another of the obelisks, hoisted way up on the shoulders of stone giants
around tumbling water.
"How the hell did they get that thing all the way up there way
back then? Pulleys?" Penny craned her neck to see.
"Yes! Bernini asked the help of the Jesuit eccentric Athanasius
Kircher. A man of science, right up your alley. He made a chamber of
mirrors as an experiment to drive cats crazy.”
"Crazy cats, okay, so what's that got to do with hard science?"
"He invented the megaphone, but also the hydraulics for this
fountain. Then he also had himself lowered into Mount Vesuvius just
before an eruption as he correctly thought the earth's depth's to be on
fire. He dreamed of how time was infinite, and the world much older
than the Bible says."
“This guy was a Jesuit but didn't get burned at the stake for
thinking like that?"
"That is the miracle!"
"This isn't that guy who wrote a book on musicology and bird
songs, and made a vomiting lobster? That was around that same time."
"The Musurgia Universalis. Yes, yes, same guy! I do not think
they have a postcard of him, or of his lobster, for your wall."
"That way is the place where they burned the guy who did not
get away with scientific thinking, Giordano Bruno," he said, pointing to
the other end of the Piazza Navona.
Beatrice called out from her perch on the steps of Santa
Agnese.
"Bambini! We go have a gelato, now, OK?" Ula reappeared
from her slow dance around the piazza where she attracted the
attention of the curious tourists who also flocked around the King Tut
mime at the other end of the Piazza Navona.
"I came here always, even when I started working. It was fun
being a model here when all the other girls lived on hard boiled eggs
and champagne! How could I ever be jealous of them, blonde
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