Vocazione

It’s a hot summer in Rome as tourists take in the usual sights and monuments they have for centuries. Among the crowds gathering to enjoy what the city has to offer, two people pay a visit to the church of San Luigi dei Francesi to see Caravaggio’s The Vocation of St Matthew. The painting immediately triggers a host of memories centered around their relationship which is coming to an end. It also leads the narrator to remember the death of an old friend years before and the way this provides a link between the painting and Graham Greene’s The Third Man. As the modern and ancient landscape of Rome begins to blur the boundaries between art and life, cinema and memory, following the iconography of both film and painting leads the narrator to speculate on the figure of Caravaggio, contrasting the more anonymous story of his own relationship with that of Greene’s own story.