The Pope Goes To My Gym

One of the first things I noticed when I joined a gym in Rome is that when anyone enters the locker room, everyone there greets them. Thankfully not with the Italian style hug and kisses on the cheek that friends might exchange on the street. That would be… awkward.

But just a nod and a buongiorno, even if the person is a perfect stranger. After having been a member of Equinox in Manhattan, where you could see someone daily for five years and never glimpse a flicker of recognition, it seemed like one more example of what makes Italy appealing— a collective effort towards the daily maintenance of the dolce vita.

I never stopped to think about just who I might be greeting.

The Omega Fitness Club San Pietro is in a storied but not particularly glamorous area, in the shadows of the imposing brown fortress of the Vatican Wall, across from the popular Pastasciuta street food spot that keeps local LUMSA students and tourists lined up for a paper carton of pasta on the go. St. Peters and the Vatican Museum are only minutes away and it’s fair to say that the primary industries in this neighborhood are tourism and Catholicism, and often a heedless mix of the two.

Shops sell souvenirs, religious icons and liturgical vestments, and sometimes all three together. It would be far easier to get your hands on a wall tapestry of the soon-to be-saint Carlo Acutis than a yoga mat. But look hard enough down the side street of Via delle Grazie, and somewhere behind the motorcycles parked on the sidewalk you’ll find Omega.

Other than the careful observance of locker room niceties, it never struck me that there was anything out of the ordinary about the place. Because the gym is in the Prati district, which houses Italy’s Palace of Justice and many of the country’s most important judicial organizations, the members are mostly lawyers who enter pontificating on their telephones and leave the same way. Well-heeled Roman ladies bust a move together in their morning Zumba class. I saw a nun come in once, which seemed an unlikely splash of local color. Little did I know there was something bigger going on in our midst.

It was only too late that I learned the truth:

Amidst the potted palm plants and the framed “Pumping Iron”-era photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger was someone dealing with far weightier things than can fit on the end of a barbell. Apparently, I was the last to receive the newsflash:

The pope goes to my gym.

I’ll admit to being skeptical when I first got the word from a friend who covers the Vatican for RAI. It seemed highly improbable— like a local urban myth. You’ve heard the one about alligators in the sewers or Nero fiddling while the city burns? How about the Holy Father doing planks by the water cooler?

But when I looked into it, it turned out to not even be much of a scoop. The Catholic media had run several stories about it, seeking to portray the new pontiff Leo XIV in the mode of a Chicago White Sox hoodie-wearing, sports-crazy everyman. As if the College of Cardinals sent up the white smoke for John Cusack.

“There are even interviews on YouTube with one of his personal trainers”, my friend told me, and now my mind really boggled. Which trainer could it be? The big guy who looks like Bluto from the Popeye cartoons? The reality turned out to be even more disconcerting.

When I saw the video, I immediately recognized Valerio, the soft-spoken guy who always wears a “Natural Born Trainer” t-shirt— the same one who had given C and I our fitness test and orientation at the club. That was the fitness test I had tried to avoid, then delayed, then complained about the whole way through. After I finished it, Valerio started to suggest a regimen I could follow. With a dismissiveness honed by 30 years in New York City, I thanked him for his suggestions and told him I wouldn’t be needing his services. Actually, I got C to tell him.

Now here he was on a news program talking about what a perfect client Cardinal Robert Prevost was— always kind, never complaining. According to Valerio, he has been coming to the gym two or three times a week over the past two years and is the very model of physical and mental fitness. When they started with a workout plan designed for a man in his mid-sixties, they quickly found the program too easy for him. Soon he was using a program meant for a man ten years younger. “He always had something positive to say about everything— the weather, the city, the people. I don’t think I ever heard him make a comment about anything that wasn’t positive, ” Valerio shared.

Oh perfect. Not only do I find out the pope can probably benchpress more than me, but he even does it with a smile. I’m sorry—no one told me there was a new code of conduct in the gym. I thought complaining was like sweating. It’s always been accepted as part of the fitness club experience.

So now I’m racking my brain as to what other breaches I may have committed over the past year, when His soon-to-be Holiness was over on the treadmill. Did I always properly wipe down the Technogym Cycle after I used it? Fold up my floor mat? Did I cut into the middle of anyone’s superset? Hopefully I at least got the buongiorno in the locker room right.

Whatever sins I may have committed in gym etiquette, I doubt I’ll be able to atone for them now. While he apparently remains on the membership rolls, it’s unlikely that Vatican City’s most important resident will be snaking his way past the motorbikes parked outside Rent a Scooter Roma to spend an hour on the StairMaster anytime soon. I suspect his FitCoins— rewards the club gives you each time you come— are probably gathering dust in his account.

It must be an incomprehensible transition to face in the course of a life. As impressive as Robert Prevost’s upward mobility in Rome has been, he’s hardly even changed neighborhoods during his stint in the city. From his first apartment on Via di Porta Angelica (just around the corner from Omega) to the Papal Palace, he’s still only a five minute walk from his former haunts.

But he is, as they say, a world away. One wonders if he ever reads the club’s newsletter and wishes he was once again an anonymous guy in a White Sox hoodie, racing along the treadmill, checking his pace or anticipating a post-workout carb boost at Pastasciuta.

This weekend Omega Fitness is hosting “Omega Summer Game: The Party” where, as the email puts it, “the biceps will be used to raise a full plate or a cool cocktail”. In a particularly Italian approach to fitness, Omega seems to always be throwing some sort of buffet dinner or celebration.

I hope Pope Leo knows he’s invited.