The San Clemente Syndrome: How Love Rises from Ruins

“I have given you the moral before the tale.”—Nietzsche.

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Call Me by Your Name is not simply read, nor merely watched—it is felt, lived, breathed in like the last golden hour of summer. André Aciman’s novel, later brought to life in Luca Guadagnino’s luminous 2018 adaptation, is less a story than an ache—an imprint of longing, a lingering warmth, the ghost of a summer that never quite fades. It exists less as a work of art and more as a feeling, something lived rather than read, something remembered rather than watched. It is the scent of sun-drenched apricots, the hush of cicadas at dusk, the painful sentiment of a love too fleeting to hold but too powerful to forget.

From this aching residue of love, André Aciman gives us The San Clemente Syndrome—a notion that love, like history, does not vanish but buries itself beneath the surface, layering over what was, building upon what could never be undone. Just as Rome’s Basilica of San Clemente stands atop the bones of centuries past, love, too, does not disappear. It settles beneath us, unseen but breathing, a foundation of ruins upon which new desires are built. Even after love is lost, it does not fade—it only sinks deeper, waiting to be unearthed.

When I first read this novel, I didn’t just absorb its words—I felt them, suffered them, as though reliving a memory that was never mine yet haunts the corridors of my heart. Every time I catch glimpses of sunlight filtering through swaying branches on a tree-lined street, I think of Elio and his quiet, ruinous longing for Oliver—a love he wagered losing dogs on. He knew he was bound to lose, yet he bet anyway, because that’s what love does. It undoes you, ruins you piece by piece, until you are composed so much of another that you can no longer recognize the shape of yourself.

I remember reading the final stretch of the novel—Elio and Oliver in Rome—where Aciman introduced San Clemente syndrome. From that moment on, I began seeing love through its lens, as if the notion had fastened itself to me, tugging mercilessly at the strings of my heart. It refused to loosen its grip, refused to be forgotten—and so here I am, writing about it.

Essentially, it embodies a sense of layered history—a present moment resting atop countless past selves, each hidden beneath the surface, echoing with meaning and complexity. Much like the Basilica di San Clemente in Rome, built upon ancient Roman catacombs, it speaks to a timelessness where narratives do not vanish but merely settle beneath new ones, waiting to be excavated.

André Aciman himself speaks of this endless excavation, this search for meaning that never quite finds its final form. “I love the idea of endurance despite every attempt to eradicate it,” he says. “And that is because the very thought of extinction is anathema.” There is something terrifying in the idea that we might one day be forgotten, that love—so consuming in its moment—might one day fade into irrelevance. And yet, what Call Me by Your Name reminds us is that love does not vanish, not truly; it settles like dust in the layers of our being, in the foundations of everything we build next. Sure, once the one you love fades or leaves, the act of receiving their love may cease—but the love itself does not. It lingers, staining the future, seeping into the life you must now live without them.

In this, lies the essence of what Aciman calls The San Clemente Syndrome—the notion that nothing is ever entirely lost, that beneath the ruins of one life lie the remnants of another, and another still. Love, identity, memory—none exist in a single, fixed form. They shift, accumulating histories like the basilica in Rome, its layers of pagan and Christian pasts coexisting in silent testament to what came before. “We’re not one thing,” Elio says. “We’re not made to be played on one instrument alone.” Like the cities buried beneath Troy, like the selves we bury within ourselves, we are never just one story. And if love rises from ruins, perhaps it was never ruined at all—only waiting to be unearthed.

This concept is not just a metaphor; it is a mirror. A devastating truth about love, about memory, about the way we do not erase the past but build upon it. Aciman, in his delicate, unflinching way, does not write of love as something fleeting, something to be had and then discarded. Love, once felt, remains—it buries itself beneath us, within us, embedded into the very structure of who we are. Of who we remain, even in the wake of loss.

This is why the chapter in Rome feels like a consecration. It is not just another stop in Elio and Oliver’s journey; it is the altar at which they celebrate what they have become to one another. The basilica of their love, erected within them, layered upon all that came before. Even when they part, even when time unspools and they are no longer the same people who walked the streets of Rome with their hands brushing, their love does not crumble. It remains. Like the Basilica of San Clemente, it is not undone—it is only built upon.

And when they see each other again, years later, they do not need to reconstruct what they once had. It is still there, buried under new layers of time and circumstance. They must only stand still, let the dust settle, and reach down into themselves to find the love that was left there—the love that will always be there.When love, in its fullest form, has been felt—truly, entirely—it cannot be undone, nor can it be unfelt. One does not simply unlove someone they have once loved with unguarded, unabashed sincerity.

So in this way, the San Clemente Syndrome chapter speaks to the very nature of human love and memory. We are all like the basilica, layered with past selves, past affections, past aches. We never truly forget the loves we have known; we only grow around them, build new structures over their foundations. And sometimes, when we least expect it, we find ourselves standing before those ruins again, realizing they are not ruins at all. 

As Aciman so aptly put it: "Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. This was the sum of everything I'd been in my life—and more… write about the person I know no one knows I am." 

At its core, it was Elio’s deepest fear—that he would become nothing more than a forgotten memory in Italy to Oliver. And yet, it stretched beyond that, mingling with the idea of human sexuality, the layered complexities of identity that Aciman explores not only here but also in his novel—Enigma Variations. It spoke to the notion of parallel lives, of how a single person can contain multitudes, living and reliving different versions of themselves across a lifetime. As the poet in the novel describes it, it is “...like an undefined, nebulous feeling, part arousal, part homesickness, part metaphor.” And Elio, in his musings, understands love, memory, and selfhood as something boundless, something infinite: "Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations. There is no rock bottom, no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers, like the Christian Catacombs, and right along these, even a Jewish Catacomb."

The meaning of San Clemente syndrome is vast, nearly impossible to untangle without slipping into endless rabbit holes—one thought leading to another, until you find yourself speaking of it forever. But at its heart, as it is portrayed in the story, it speaks of the layers we accumulate through experience and connection, how they construct the full portrait of who we are. Elio confessed to the poet that this was his favourite poem in the collection, and perhaps that was because he saw himself in it. Standing at the threshold of adulthood, still piecing himself together, the idea of a stratified self—a being shaped by past and present, by memory and desire—must have resonated deeply. This whole notion of layering—of self, of love, of history, both personal and universal—extends beyond Elio and Oliver. It belongs to something far older, something eternal, as though their love itself were just another palimpsest written over the echoes of those who came before. 

Essentially, the basilica’s three layers evoke Plato’s tripartite theory of the soul: logic, spirit, and appetite. Mind, love, and desire. Call Me by Your Name does not merely tell a love story—it excavates it. It forces us to confront the terrifying, unrelenting truth that some loves do not fade, no matter how deeply they are buried. 

It has been said a million times before, and it will be said a million times more until we grasp it in its entirety. The greatest tragedy of Call Me by Your Name is not the love itself, but the inevitability of its impermanence—the very fact that it does not last in the way we wish it to. Two people so perfectly attuned to one another, so effortless together, so layered within each other, do not get to share a life. Rome, for them, is the pinnacle—the point before the descent. A final sun-drenched embrace before the inevitable shadow. 

But perhaps that is what makes it beautiful. Love, real love, does not vanish. It settles into the soul like ancient stonework, like the foundation of a church that will always stand, even when new lives are built upon it. It is there, waiting, beneath the layers. And if love is a ruin, it is only because we must sometimes dig deep to find it again.

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Glossary:

Anathema - something or someone that one vehemently dislikes.

Consecration - the action of making or declaring something, typically a church, sacred.

Nebulous - in the form of a cloud or haze; hazy | (of a concept) vague or ill-defined.

Stratified - arranged in layers.

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