The New Yorker:

Paul Elie
Reporting from Rome

A message comes via WhatsApp: “white smoke.” And then the bells start to ring—the bells of the churches of Rome’s centro storico, their different timbres and tempi mingled in with car horns and sirens. It’s as if the bells are tolling one another into action, a collective sound at once ancient, impersonal, and deeply affecting.

I am up among the bells, on a rooftop near the Piazza Farnese. Today, over at the Vatican, the branded, event-television aspect of the conclave is on full display: pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square and reporters in the press room alike watching the giant screens showing the “fumata cam” (the streaming video of the smokestack atop the Sistine Chapel). When the smoke came this morning—it was black—the watchers took photos of a picture beamed in from a few hundred feet away. The rooftops adjacent to St. Peter’s are occupied by TV crews or are being rented for five hundred euros a day; I chose this rooftop, among the bells of Rome, so as to hear their tolling—the least mediated, most local aspect of this whole affair.

And now the bell is tolling in the cupola of the church building whose roof I am on. Habemus papam: Latin for “we have a Pope.” O.K., but which Pope do we have?

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