Rome, bereft of its citizens.

No European capital sheds its August citizenry as decisively as Rome. The exodus is a literal rite of passage. Residents of affluent neighborhoods (and, by chance, I live in one) relocate to their summer sinecures in the country, by the sea, or in the mountains. Others fly to exotic locations or take a leisurely sail to Greece, on boats they own. The privileged vanish for the whole of the month while the less flush take shorter side trips, whether to rural homesteads or to rented apartments on one of the peninsula’s coasts.

The August-flight trend has abated considerably from 50 years ago, when the whole of the city seemed to empty out. The first two decades of the new century saw many Rome residents sit tight, enjoying the pleasures of their ghost town. The hardcore members of this club call August their favorite month in which not to make a move. The ranks of these stay-home militants are fewer now, thinned by a virus that all but shut the country for two summers running. Now, all want as much liberation as they can get.

What’s at the core of this yearning for summer flight? Part of it is an offshoot of Latin siestas, an institutionalized kind of relaxation in a country that treasures the value of breaking from work routines. This is not, as some say, a reflection of sloth, but a refusal to kowtow to Anglo-Saxon notions of constant work as a social obligation and an economic cure-all. That Italian annual wages are among the lowest in Europe, with many still earning less than about $20,000 a year, all but invites the offsetting break. If toil yields little, long breaks from that same toil stand to reason. The secure prospect of summer relief makes urban life, snarled at best, somewhat less oppressive. When Rome workers learn that most of their American counterparts receive far less — often under two weeks — many balk. Slim pickings in the age of smartphone stress. Too slim. And I’m inclined to agree. Eleven months of ceaselessly instant distraction, though addictive, is cognitively inhumane.

I walked on streets made so hot by the sun that my loafers left imprints. I presumed those marks would last forever, my ambling spirit with them.

But Rome’s escapism can pose problems, especially to the ailing who live alone. And I am one such creature. In my yesteryears I delighted in Rome’s empty August days. While visiting my mother — my parents were separated, with my father in Washington, D.C., my mother in Rome — I’d take advantage of her long afternoon naps to scout the city, my arrows drawn in crayon on a map, all the while chasing after ubiquitous lizards, most fat and green, the proprietors, or so it seemed, of the city’s empty parks.

I’d ride buses, many empty but for one or two passengers, and poke my head out from open windows and into the hot breezes. I was a slender teenager, freewheeling and unburdened. I walked on streets made so hot by the sun that my loafers left imprints. I presumed those marks would last forever, my ambling spirit with them.

I was wrong.

The lizards have all but vanished, and my imprints were long ago paved over.

As for the bus rides, I have learned, metaphorically, that the ride from seventeen to seventy can be short, and the terminus less agreeable to reach. The only comfort is an awareness that all riders on all buses of the mind are inevitably headed in the same direction.

The August 15 holiday known as Ferragosto was the creation of Caesar Augustus, who made the month’s first day into a workers’ holiday. That was 2,000 years ago, and, over centuries, the sense of leisure overtook the month. And there’s now no August separated from Italian downtime.

At night, as I stand on my terrace, not a single light brightens the windows of my three-building apartment complex. Not one. This was of course not the case in recent plague days, when their brightness was blinding.

The night hush is pristine.

Even the braying seagulls, at rest in eaves after a day of coastal hunting, quiet their shrieking.

The emptiness of streets, what little I see of them, reminds me of decades gone by, which would in most cases delight me.

But these days I need help: people to bring me groceries, to adjust my computer, to fix vocal functions when my smartphone misbehaves. Near-blindness changes the known world, and life’s half-full glass becomes half-empty.

But all are away: maids, helpers, caregivers, doctors. Some restaurants are closed.

This is no time for a crisis, so I work hard to avert one, mostly succeeding.

I burrow into my depression and find its silver lining to be the writing of words, though the act of doing so is halting, anxious, and overheated by hot sun and teeming mind.

In solitary confinement, instead I count myself glad for the occasional sounds of trams in the distance.

I wait for calls that mostly do not come. No longer Christopher in August’s wonderland, I find myself imprisoned by the culture of this vacant month. In solitary confinement, instead I count myself glad for the occasional sounds of trams in the distance.

Only in my mind’s eye can I turn the clock back to an era in which my mother’s naps were sacred.

After which, urged by the evening breezes, we’d walk together to the one open coffee bar, where we’d sit with her friends and I’d douse my iced tea with sugar.

Be careful, said one of her friends, you might become too sweet.

It was mid-August in another era, and all was well, and all would be well always.

Or so I believed.

But such belief is fragile. Now, decades after lizard hunts, as I fumble to adjust the lounge chair on the terrace so that I might come face-to-face with the night sky I once knew so well, I am thwarted. Above me is an ominously black canvas.

So it is that as my mood darkens, the nearby church bells announce midnight and thus usher in August 15^th, ferragosto, for me irrevocably changed. The poet wrote, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls,” and I dare not tempt fate by asking a question to which I already know the answer. Instead, I beckon the heavens to furnish me with memories, a task it knows by heart, my heart, and it does that in abundance. For which I am cosmically grateful.