In the National Archaeological Museum of Naples sits a young man, bending forward over himself, his left arm draped over his knee as he looks shyly down.
Naked, he’s the Roman god Hermes, according to the sculptor who cast him in bronze nearly 2,000 years ago, a commission destined for the lavish Villa dei Papiri in nearby Pompeii. But to me, he looks like someone else.
Only a few hours previously, I’d been looking at a bronze statue of another young man in the district of Sanità, 10 minutes away from the museum. He, too, was sitting down, bending across his own body; he, too, looked pensive. But that boy was in jeans and a T-shirt, and where Hermes sits alone in the museum, around this boy’s neck hung rosaries,…
