WITH A CITY MAP in hand, we found our way on foot easily down the Via Nazionale—a busy commercial street—rode the elevator up to our pensione, and checked in. Immediately I was struck by an initially indescribable hint in the air of something peculiar. There was no offensive odor or (at that point) noise; but this was not the Quisisana, clearly. What was it though? After brief naps we found our way to the dining room in the hopes of a more or less decorous semi-British tea like the ones we’d enjoyed in the dim indoor Florentine light.
Wrong. The dining room had several tables occupied by our compatriots—boys roughly our age, dressed much like the off-duty American airmen we’d seen on weekends in Oxford, drinking beer or red wine and accompanied by Italian girls who appeared to be both waitresses at the Nazionale and something more (when they fetched the refills of beer and wine, they’d sit down briefly and laugh with the boys). Where had we landed? We were hardly alarmed. But Jim gave me more than one quizzically amused look; and since there seemed no chance for afternoon food here, we went outside.
Back toward the station we’d passed a place which advertised itself as “American Bar.” We turned in there. I know that I ordered two grilled-cheese sandwiches—a childhood comfort snack—and at length I was served two fairly convincing replicas of that American classic. When we returned to the street, I was struck by a local phenomenon which may long since have vanished—numerous pairs of young Italian men, many of them in army uniform, were walking arm in arm—and soon we encountered a small clutch of American acquaintances from Oxford.
With them, we exchanged a little mutual information—mainly useful local addresses. Their parked car had been robbed the previous night of all their ski equipment—they were ultimately headed for Switzerland—but on the advice of the police, had located it this morning at the central Roman flea market. Then one of them said he was sure he’d see us at the week’s oncoming big event, which he then previewed for us—two evenings hence there’d be a Christmas Eve mass at the ancient basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Jim had been reared Catholic but had left the church, I’ve mentioned my own withdrawal from formal worship, but the sound of the words Christmas Eve mass proved potent.
Back to the pensione for dinner—and an even more relaxed display of our fly-boy countrymen and their pensione-employee girlfriends. Neither Jim nor I was remotely censorious about healthy sex; but how much was desirable, here in the midst of the pensione’s only dining room? There were no overt displays, but there was a good deal of pinching, squealing, and occasional bear hugs and smacking kisses. For a very few minutes, it was likably amusing; but then it was unlikably odd, especially since we were paying for two meals per day but apparently had no choice in the matter of atmosphere.
Nonetheless, we got through a filling but disappointingly prepared dinner—a distinct letdown from Florence. Our landlady at the Quisisana was plainly misinformed; had the pensione changed hands without her knowledge? Our compatriots and their girlfriends were nothing less than cheerfully friendly, though. We had no fear of late-night black eyes or a burglarized room. While the Nazionale hardly promised to be the resort for writing and reading that we’d had in Florence, Jim and I kept our thoughts mostly to ourselves (apart from Jim’s amused looks and my occasional observations on the accents of the airmen, many of them Southern). So we spent the better part of the next day in the beginnings of an exploration of the literally endless fascinations of Rome. The weather was damp and chilly; so most of our explorations were indoors—the museums of the Capitoline Hill and then, in a brief patch of sun, a preliminary walk through the Forum itself and the adjacent forums of a few later emperors.
* * *
Two sights are still deeply printed in memory. On the streets there were frequent young women with as many as three snotty children and a babe at the breast, extending their hands for money in a smiling attempt at beggary. And actual shepherds from the hills beyond Rome, with lambs tied beside them, were playing their handmade pipes in what (for local ears) may have been recognizable Christmas tunes. I’m sorry to say that, in suspicious American-abroad fashion—were these real shepherds?—I failed to give even one of them a tiny gift from my already heavy pocketful of the featherweight aluminum coins of that era.
On Christmas Eve itself, by the time full dark had fallen, we were on the Avenue of the Imperial Fora; and without knowing our exact whereabouts, we walked ahead till we wound up gazing at the floodlit Colosseum just ahead of us—the real proto-Roman Colosseum, the sink of centuries of mayhem and blood, one of the magnets of my boyhood imagination. Films like DeMille’s rousing Sign of the Cross and my two years in high-school Latin classes, where our textbooks were crammed with nineteenth-century photographs of the remains of the ancient city, had given me a powerful appetite for walking through the originals (spruced up by Mussolini) and touching a stone that Augustus or even Nero might have touched, not to mention mad Caligula. In the ninth grade I’d even assembled, from pasted-together sheets of typing paper, a ten-foot-long scroll to which I attached every photograph I could find of the places I was now on the verge of touching. Near as I was to my twenty-third birthday, I’d never been this elated since seeing my first live elephant at maybe age five.
Here tonight, traffic was winding around the great arena as though this were the end of any business day. I kept reminding myself that Christmas was only a couple of hours ahead. Despite the appropriate live shepherds and begging young mothers, Italy had not yet adopted the visual Germanic components of American Christmas—the lights, the trees, and Santa. And my Christmas emotions were still off-stride. We dodged our way safely through a hundred honking Fiats and the ear-splitting Vespas and Lambrettas that were recent additions to the cacophony of Italian city life. Safe so far, we moved forward past no barricades or guards whatever and spent the better part of a black hour in winding through the arches till we paused on the lip of the vast oblong arena and tried to glimpse what was barely visible there below us.
It was probably a risky thing to do, at any hour, much less in the night (we’d asked for no guidance on coming here). Once or twice I thought I saw a faceless shadow moving beyond us—a homeless tramp or a silent cutthroat? But no one came near, no knife-wielding contemporary, no gladiatorial or Christian-martyr ghost. Maybe it was now too cold to be outdoors. Any Roman mugger or madman would have to be as inured to cold as Jim and I after two months in Oxford colleges and that seemed unlikely.
Eventually we made our way back uphill and asked the way toward the midnight mass we’d heard of at Santa Maria Maggiore. So it must have been well past ten when we entered the basilica—one of Rome’s most beautiful, dating in its earliest stages to the fifth century (seven centuries before Mob Quad). Already the long space was jampacked—no benches or chairs, everyone standing. If our American friends were there, we never found them, locked as we were in the fervent mob. The most we could see of the altar suggested that priests and their acolytes were at work in the complex Latin rituals of pre–Vatican II, far more beckoning than the later vernacular substitutes. Incense filled the air with its mystifying smoke and the lavish odor that seemed a promise at least of the sweetness of the child to be born as midnight struck. Several processions were winding their difficult ways through our midst, and a choir was chanting in the vault above us.
Though reared a Protestant I’d long been mesmerized by Catholic worship; and I was riveted now, despite a mild tendency to claustrophobia. For all that Jim had fallen away from the church, he held his ground too; and as huge deep bells began to toll midnight, yet another procession sought a path among us, slowed by the many who sought to touch its burden. Many young men were bearing on their shoulders an immense baroque reliquary with a crystal-sided central container holding what appeared to be worm-eaten boards. I overheard an American near me tell his female partner “It’s the actual manger from Bethlehem.” And so it claimed to be, brought here from Palestine some twelve hundred years ago.
As it passed, Jim declined his chance at touching it. I touched for us both and could think of no Christmas, among my twenty-two, that equaled this in its nearness to the actual cause of the celebration—a child’s arrival, that simple ineluctable core of the faith I was born in. Unchurched as I’d been in the year behind me, those wormy boards (whose crystal box I touched in the mob) reignited my absolute certainty that the babe they’d borne was, in some incomprehensible sense, God himself—a God designed to die in agony three decades later, then rise from the dead, and save us all: Platonic Jim and even me. I’d never truly doubted the fact; now its bedrock depth was uncovered for good.
When we reached the pensione again near two o’clock, the premises were fairly quiet. But by the time we’d shut our books and turned out the lamp between our beds, the nocturnal games were just cranking up beyond our door. We made a jocular remark or two about what the next hours might hold. We were each almost entirely exhausted; but all night long I’d be roused long enough to hear what seemed to be touch football played along our hallway, cheered on by squealing girls and bystanding drunks (the sudden shouts were all in American English). I’d seen no sign of other paying guests for our military comrades; and since Jim and I were more or less unconscious, there were no complaints.
Certainly no one from the all but invisible management requested any reduction in boisterousness. Still, just when I’d think I might as well dress and head back out to walk till dawn, the din would go completely silent as though all the players and cheerleaders had retired to their own beds for whatever after-game sleep or alternate entertainment was pursued. But then occasional shouts and grunts would revive in the hall till maybe an hour before real dawn, when silence slowly descended; and I must have then got two hours of sleep.
* * *
More church bells woke us in broad daylight. Jim and I wished each other Merry Christmas, brushed our teeth, and staggered toward breakfast (could food be offered after such a night?). The dining room bore signs of the recent capers; but none of our countrymen had stirred, not upright at least. Two or three of the dark-haired girls I recalled from yesterday wished us “Buon Natale,” brought us coffee, rolls, butter, and apricot jam; then—a little shamefacedly—withdrew to the kitchen. No sooner were they tucked out of sight when Jim and I met one another’s whey-faced grins, confessing our first big continental folly, and burst out laughing.
All but in unison we mouthed in stage whispers what even a baby boy might have guessed two days ago—“We’re staying in a whorehouse!” I may have been a little more temporarily pleased by the fact than Jim. In his calm but firm voice, he reminded me of his intention to complete a reading of all the Platonic dialogues in the next three weeks. Could Socrates continue his explorations of virtue, truth, and beauty here? Jim didn’t quite ask me, but I was a little chastened by his gravity; and in another few sentences, we’d devised a plan. We’d find the Pensione Bellavista Milton and go on our knees if necessary in the hope of reclaiming the reservation (canceled by our Tuscan friend). If all else failed, we could claim she was dotty and had made a big mistake. Well, she had. But why? We’d never know.
* * *
The Milton’s address was indeed perfect—the morning was bright and the pensione sat literally across the street from the vast and green Borghese Gardens. But the tiny clerk at the ground-floor reception desk took an endless moment to open a ledger and stare down his truly Ciceronian Roman nose at the fact that we’d canceled a perfectly good reservation and had now turned up—and on Christmas morning? Where had we been? I was too flummoxed to tell him. Jim, with Socratic candor, gave a simple explanation. “Ah,” the clerk nodded, “the Nazionale.” Then he looked up, knowingly. “You enjoy your night?” We both said “No.” At last the clerk managed to release a thin-lipped smile from the depths of his heart. Then more gazing down his nose at the giant ledger before, with agonizing slowness, he entered our names.
Back we raced to the Nazionale and closed our bags. The clerk there expressed mild regret at our proposed departure; but with the now-welcome laissez-faire attitude of the establishment, he wished us well and even exchanged a few of our dollars at a favorable rate. So we splurged on a taxi for the trip back up to the peak of the Pincian Hill. All the way, we were subject to further laughing at what our eminently respectable Florentine landlady had parked us in. Could she, after all, have co-owned a brothel, well south of Florence? We almost hoped so. And of course we hadn’t departed in any sense of dudgeon, only in the hope of undisturbed sleep, good food, and a slightly less louche atmosphere than the Nazionale was offering under present management.
I noticed, the moment we entered our room, that there was no soap at the basin; and I asked about it. The bellman seemed initially surprised that we hadn’t brought our own but said cheerfully that he could walk down the street and buy it for us. We handed over the small sum and off he went. Only as we were unpacking at the Milton—in our sizable room with shared facilities down the hall—did I realize that neither Jim nor I had thought to buy even the smallest Christmas gift for one another, and a modest wave of nostalgia rose and swamped me.
This was my first Christmas absence, ever, from home. In Florence I’d bought presents for my mother and brother—an antique gold cross for Mother from the Ponte Vecchio, a leather box for Bill. In time I’d pay American Express, here by the Spanish Steps, to pack and ship them. I felt a longing to phone home and at least hear the family voices. But again the cost of transatlantic calls was huge, and in any case I’d heard nightmare stories of Italian phone service. So when Jim took a seat by our tall wide window and opened his Plato, I said I believed I’d take a long walk. We’d meet at dinnertime.
I still had no guidebook, but I set off downhill in what I thought was the general direction of the Colosseum. I’ve never known why but—on that one day, at many crossroads—there were orderly piles of pristine foodstuffs (cans, boxes, bags, even unopened boxes of panet-tone). I assumed they were set out for the poor, but no one seemed to be collecting them. Auto traffic was remarkably sparse. Instead, on foot, there were frequent middle-class Italian families, focused round their youngest child, invariably clothed (like their parents) in holiday splendor—new cap and coat, new shoes but above all the brand of adoration that Italians seemed always to reserve for the youngest.
As I reached what was plainly the center of the ancient city—I didn’t yet know it, but the Palatine Hill was rising beside me—I came on a long narrow empty piece of muddy ground with a single strand of rope on waist-high poles around the perimeter. Maybe it was meant to exclude human beings; but since there was no one in sight, I stepped across it easily and strode to the midst before I realized where I must be. This had to be the Circus Maximus; and while there were no signs of excavations in progress, the ground was strewn with smallish fragments of marble. The largest were, say, the size of a man’s head; the smallest, egg-size. Of course I was tempted to pocket a reminder—anyone could bring a bag, step over or under that one strand of rope, and take home twenty pounds of fragments uncaught. I took one piece, smaller than a pack of cigarettes, with only the most rudimentary signs of human shaping. Then I fumbled my way into a left turn and, lo, the Colosseum was there just ahead.
Even now in midafternoon, warm sunlight was bathing the city. Golden sun would be a cliché; but the light was near golden, both in color and in its value to my sun-starved mind. Yet there was almost no one else, not even a guard, in this enormous construct—one of the world’s most famous tourist magnets. The family-centered Romans were surely at their ancestral homes, and again the tourist trade had still not reached its present suffocating heights. There was even no ticket seller, no policeman to block me. With last night’s knowledge of the basic structure, I walked straight to the upper rim of the arena, went a few steps downward, and sat on a seat occupied no doubt by the butts of many generations of bloodthirsty Romans on holiday.
A few years earlier I’d developed a susceptibility to sunlight; I’d break out in hives if I spent more than an hour or so in direct exposure. But now I unbuttoned my white nylon shirt, lay well back; and what I thought of through my long Yule light-bath was not gladiators or psychopathic Caesars or my allergy to sunlight but my Carolina home—how far off I was from the roots of my life and intended work, not to mention a bereft only parent and my only near kinsman, a younger brother with whom I’d never had the least grave disagreement in our years together. I was not homesick but, if a mind can truly transport a body through space—and of course it can—I was back with all my maternal family in the rambling house in its tall oak grove in the village of Macon where I’d been born. And soon I was seated at the bountiful table of my aunt Ida, one of the very few human beings whom I loved without a trace of reservation—a secular saint, much given to both deep-diving depression and guarded laughter.
By the time I was back uphill at the Milton, it was likewise dinnertime in Rome. I can’t remember what we were served; but since it was our first chance at a good local meal, I’m glad to recall that it tastes good in memory—surely some form of domestic bird preceded by fish and followed by a complex Christmas cake and first-rate coffee—our English coffee had been so weak that, as my father said of such brews, “It needed a crutch to get out of the cup.”
Maybe all these years later, when so many young people travel early and roam far afield, it’s hard for some to imagine the unprecedented mixture of joy and sorrow I felt that single day and most of that night—joy that I was working (or at least worrying about the slowness of my work) and living on my own in entirely new territory; joy that I’d fallen in love again and sorry at all I’d left far off: family, old friends, and a landscape and culture whose urgency to me I couldn’t yet fathom. The pleasurable compound was so immensely powerful, it drove me on through many days to come—days, months, even the better part of three years—and here I’d first sensed its force in a city which, with Jerusalem and Athens, had witnessed more of the crucial thought and work of the human race than any of its newer and larger successors. No wonder I’d seek every later chance to return to Rome.
* * *
The remaining weeks there coincided with a season of early winter rain—not downpours but drizzles in the midst of fairly warm air and frequent stretches of sunlight—yet Jim and I, together and apart, availed ourselves of as much of what Rome had to offer as we could digest. The day after Christmas, when I bought the encyclopedic and very scholarly Club Italiano Tourismo guide to the city (a thick handful in easy Italian and bound in bright red cloth), I realized that this city, which was then by no means enormous, offered endless wonders. But I did my share of visits. And again we wandered on our own—nothing so corn-fed as an organized tour for us. I never left the room without my CIT guide. The fact that it was in Italian quickly improved my comfort in the language, and its thoroughness contributed greatly to our decisions on what to see and what we were seeing when we got there. The obvious first visits were imposing. We took a whole day, almost by ourselves, to roam the plentiful remains of the Forum and the (then) little-visited Palatine Hill, the cradle of the city with its memories of the twins Romulus and Remus, legendary founders of the city.
Beyond legend, the long plateau at the present summit of the hill bore its still tangible remains of good and evil, sane and insane, and merely brilliant or incompetent emperors. Among so many sites that astonish with their survival, I retain especially deep-cut memories of my first visit to the House of Livia (the wily wife of Augustus and the malign female star of Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius) and the nearby Temple of Cybele with its memories of self-castrated priests and the reputed site of the Lupercal, the cave where the twins were nurtured by a she-wolf.
After my first climb up the hill with Jim, I returned more than once—and many times in later years—in an effort to begin imagining the sheer quantity of power once contained in, and dispensed from, this single place—supremely peaceful as it is now and crowned only with Rome’s towering umbrella pines. In 1955 we’d only recently come through the now little-remembered Korean War, and the worst of Vietnam lay more than a decade ahead. What stared all American young men in the face during my draft-eligible years was Moscow and the Cold War threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction—or MAD as it was called. Nonetheless there amid the defiant survivals of imperial Rome, I harbored no thoughts of the eventual and inevitable decline of the empire which America was so half-consciously but gorily building for itself. Was that a symptom, in me, of the famous political oblivion of 1950s America or merely of my own monumental unawareness of the present dire state of world power? (the big majority of my present students, five decades later, seem at least as oblivious).
God knew, I’d been intensely conscious—for the nearly five years since I turned eighteen—that my country meant to draft me for service if I met its none-too-rigorous standards for induction; and I’d picked my way through the eggshells of the Selective Service System (never considering that my sexual tilt might disqualify me). Yet in Europe, while I never once thought of permanent exile, I felt a blind safety. Since my father’s death and given my absence from Mother’s widowed life, I wanted to feel my separation from everything meant by home; and I know that I read no American paper or magazine with anything resembling steadiness.
Another day we moved on—a few years forward in history—to the basilica of San Pietro which stands on the site of the Circus of Nero (where tradition says St. Peter was crucified) and above the foundations of the first great church completed by the emperor Constantine in A.D. 326. With my tendency to give Roman Catholics a bye in a good many matters, it’s hard for me to see a way that a sane visitor would not be impressed, if not deeply moved, by St. Peter’s with the calm spatial volumes of its vast central aisle climaxing under Michelangelo’s dome where Bernini’s spiraling bronze canopy soars above the main altar with St. Peter’s skeletal remains beneath. And against the back wall of the apse, Bernini’s towering shrine for the Chair of Peter is supported on the bronze fingertips of the prime doctors of the church—Augustine and Ambrose, Athanasius and John Chrysostom. The crowded side aisles—which begin, on the right, with Michelangelo’s exquisite first triumph, his elegant Pietà, and proceed on both sides to offer their sometimes dignified, occasionally bizarre tombs—may prove another matter for almost any visitor, especially Protestants accustomed to much less adornment of their shrines.
At the time of my first visits during that Christmas season, the adjacent Vatican palace was occupied by the austere and endlessly controversial Pius XII—was he pro-Nazi or not; did he help the Jews or not? But I never saw him, though when I walked round the roof of the basilica, I glimpsed a moving shadow at what I’d heard was his window. His skull, which was then almost all one could see of his gaunt face; his circular steel-rimmed spectacles, his unsmiling mouth—if the shadow was Pius, it never came nearer than a hundred yards’ distance.
There were plentiful other indelible sights. First was the church of San Pietro in Vincoli which displays not only the chains St. Peter wore to his upside-down crucifixion but also—in a dim side aisle as almost an afterthought—Michelangelo’s potent statue of Moses, larger than life with an unnerving resemblance to the actor Charlton Heston. When Jim and I were there, a professional photographer suddenly lit the statue for pictures; and we had the luck of seeing Moses in a way that even Michelangelo can never have seen him—almost blindingly revealed in every detail of the surface. That brilliance only served to increase the threat inherent in the biblical moment which the sculptor intended—Moses returned from Mount Sinai, with the newly revealed tables of the Law, only to find his people engaged in the worship of a golden calf.
Third was the emperor Hadrian’s enormous round tomb, Castel Sant’Angelo, gutted within by centuries of looting invaders who even disposed of Hadrian’s ashes but were powerless to destroy so enormous a monument to his virtue as a ruler. Then came Ostia, the seaport of ancient Rome which Jim and I, for some reason, were so determined to see that we actually took a train to the literally deserted site, long since beached by a gradual silting up, only to find little to see but the roofless unadorned walls of many undistinguished buildings; ruins without interesting stories attached are as lifeless as mummified dogs by the road. The short train trip however, on another gray day, was a welcome relief from the hours we’d been spending in our room—Jim with his increasingly incredible fidelity to Plato, me with Samson Agonistes and my attempt to push on with a few more paragraphs on the story which I’d commenced in Florence.
Next was the by-then-underground, the huge and almost never visited Golden House, built by the emperor Nero after the fire which destroyed much of Rome in A.D. 64. Most of the original structure, intended to cover some 125 acres, was destroyed or buried by later emperors. Still I could wander—entirely alone (no guards were present, not one other visitor and Jim was elsewhere)—through high vaulted spaces whose walls bore dozens of barely visible frescoes that had proved so enriching to painters who first saw them when the house was rediscovered late in the fifteenth century. I could linger in enormous state rooms—and briefly in the cubicles in which unimaginable crimes or lunacies at least might have occurred. Since early boyhood I’d had a revolted fascination with Nero—his bull-necked head and the history of his progression from his beginnings as a reasonably benign ruler to a ludicrous madman and eventual suicide. And here in his megalomanic palace, he began to seem so uncannily near me that, after a gloom-burdened hour, I hurried out into welcome sunlight.
* * *
Among so many other sites, those that would prove useful in later memory, there were the Borghese Gardens and groves, so serene by day, and poised just opposite our pensione. They surrounded the Galleria Borghese with—among a horde of objects too beautiful to digest—I recall most clearly (for its awfulness) Canova’s Ivory-soap vapid statue of Napoleon’s sister Pauline, Bernini’s painfully imaginative Apollo and Daphne, his truculent David, and the many sinister but beckoning Caravaggio boys. The same wooded throughways and bushes also converted, almost instantly at sundown, into the central pick-up spot for whores of all gender. In the mid-1950s, as Jim and I tested the periphery by night, the arrangements seemed more orderly—and safer—than those in a number of other Roman street fairs. You stopped your tiny Fiat or opulent Ferrari by the curb, a particular girl or boy (mostly well-dressed) approached your open passenger door; you leaned over to discuss your needs and the fee to be charged for their satisfaction; then you beckoned your hooker into the car or drove ahead to the next eager provider. Only an ancient city, surely, could have organized its sex life so relatively painlessly (for its men, of course—the darlings of all southern cultures).
The fact that I’ve postponed the Sistine Chapel till this late in my list of wonders says nothing about the extent of my response to Michelangelo’s ceiling and altarpiece. I visited the chapel more than once on that first trip; and though it had not yet undergone the highly dubious cleaning of the 1980s, I understood plainly that it was the only man-made thing I’d yet seen which was past belief in the extent of the sheer brain- and hand-power involved in the achievement of such grandeur, such witnessing to a human desire to come before God with a power dangerously comparable to God’s own.
Supremely for me, though, the site that struck and moved me most powerfully—and has gone on doing so through every subsequent visit—was the Pantheon. Not only is it the best preserved of all ancient Roman buildings (its broad dome is inexplicably intact), there can never have been a structure built here—or elsewhere in all the succeeding centuries—which equals the immensity of its majesty, its passionate intent to honor its native city and the gods who sustain her, and the genius of whomever conceived its glory.
And speaking of glory and its decline, on my first visit to the Pantheon, ex-king Umberto II of Italy was there, visiting the tomb of his father. Though Umberto of Savoy had served as king for only a month, after World War II, he had continued to inspire considerable loyalty in numerous Italians. And as I stood apart and watched him at the family tomb, a woman approached him, knelt, and tried to kiss his shoes. Umberto quickly drew her upright and spoke briefly with her. The encounter left me thinking of the realities of another vanished power in such a place. Had Hadrian himself, on this spot, ever experienced such an awed tribute? And speaking of Roman mysteries, the Italian constitution of 1947 had forbidden Umberto to return to Italian soil in his lifetime. Yet several bystanders whispered to me, that morning on the spot, that the man with the wreath was Umberto; and my own acquaintance with photographs of the ex-king confirmed the fact. Had he simply come incognito to his father’s grave?
* * *
By evening our long walks up and down the city’s hills left us more than ready for the good dinner that the Milton always provided—mostly plain but delicious and served with mute elegance by men who seemed Roman to the core, dark and dignified but ready to respond to any word of thanks with a smile that was either genuine or was one more tribute to the Roman gift for perfect simulation. After the cheese and fruit, Jim and I mostly took our books back to the room or to the small lounge and read there, unless a certain pair of old women who seemed to be permanent residents were seated with their knitting and their endless low-pitched stream of complaint against life in general. I could stand about three minutes of their cranky duet; then I’d go to our room, though if I’d lingered with more patience I might have improved my Italian markedly, as well as my list of warnings against a grudging old age.
In retrospect it seems to me a remarkable fact that two healthy young men, neither of them possessed of extraordinary needs or demonic pressures, could have spent more than a month of evenings as quietly and compatibly as Jim Griffin and I. When I think of the students I’ve taught in the past five decades, I suspect that most of them would find our behavior weird or, at the least, incredible in its calm dedication to what’s now called the “academics” of university life. Where was the other half—our social life? I think I’m fair to the majority of my present-day students in saying that they’d read the above pages and wonder why we weren’t seeking the Florentine and Roman bars and clubs, meeting our Italian contemporaries, and getting on with the dancing and talking, drinking and hooking up (that latest name for no-fault sexual events)—those involvements that now seem not only desirable but a kind of life’s blood to so many American middle-class “kids” (Jim and I would have been kids by current definition).
Any explanation of the contrast that’s overtaken contemporary American youth is almost sure to sound more like the old ladies in the Milton lounge than useful good sense, so I won’t engage in guessing—except to say that Jim and I were the offspring of parents who’d survived the deprivations of the Depression and the steady demands of the Second War. We had no genetic connection with the lively sociopolitical generation of the 1960s and early ’70s, and some of our innate quiet was likely a product of that difference. To go further, as I’ve said, would involve me in deploring a great deal of what I see now. In any case, I can’t recall either Jim or me expressing, or feeling, any lack of excitement in our Italian weeks.
* * *
Before we headed back to Oxford, though, we made one attempt to compensate for the fact that we’d failed to seek any real acquaintance with live Italians. An older English friend had given us the name of a young brother and sister—Vieri and Nicoletta Traxler—and we made postal contact with them in our final days. They replied with an immediate phone message at the Milton. Could we come to dinner a few nights later at Vieri’s home? We accepted gladly and, with a certain amount of fumbling, we found his house in the silent dark of the Via del Velabro near the Arch of Janus, between the Palatine Hill and the Tiber. In memory it seems a small house, but the dining room had a handsome large fragment of old mosaic on the wall, and an excellent dinner was served. The talk, in impeccable English, was pleasant; so in all, we spent a warm and jocular evening with the two Traxlers.
They apparently enjoyed it as well; and with no coaching from us, they suggested another evening with the chance to meet a few of their friends. On that second occasion, we met Vieri and Nicoletta—with three or four friends of roughly our age—in a loud and cheerful restaurant in the funky cross-the-river district of Trastevere and had an even finer time. Fine with a single strange moment of exception. When I noted that several of our wineglasses were empty, I took the neck of the huge flask of Chianti in hand to repair the lack.
But before I could proceed to fill the glasses overhandedly (as wine is normally poured in America), the most beautiful of us—the gorgeous Olga Millo—seized my wrist and said “You are holding the bottle wrong.” She made me set the flask down and showed me the proper method. With a certain male American stubbornness—and in hopes of a mild, maybe slightly inebriated, joke—I took up the flask again, just as I’d held it before. Olga then flung a fiery gaze at my eyes—“In Sicily they would kill you for this.” Ah, right. I repaired my mysterious gaffe, the evening recommenced happily; and afterward several of the party took us on to what they said was the only English-language film theatre in Rome.
There was in fact such a place—very small but elegantly fitted—and the film was Doctor at Sea, a brand-new entry in a series of stories about the life of a young English physician. Only just recently, fifty years later, I found a videotape and reminded myself of its innocuous details. The doctor was played, as ever, by a young Dirk Bogarde who was serving as a ship’s doctor on a luxury voyage in the Mediterranean. The female flirtation on board was played by a new French actress called Brigitte Bardot. This was before Bardot glittered to the top of international fame as an outrageous sex kitten, and none of us had seen her on screen before now.
When we eventually entered the theatre, the lights were already out, a newsreel was playing loudly, and we groped our way into seats on a row toward the back. When my eyes adjusted, I could see that—apart from the four or five of us—the theatre was entirely empty except for a couple who sat literally just ahead of me and slightly to my right. The film proceeded on its feather-light and easily forgettable way. The one really striking component was the chanteuse aboard ship—played by, surprisingly, Bardot—and the difficulty with which, in a 1955 English movie, she managed to damp down to acceptable levels her naturally high rate of physical smolder.
When the film ended and the house lights rose, I looked at the well-behaved young couple just ahead of me. It consisted, without question, of Brigitte Bardot and a young male companion. I can see her clearly still—in a French version of the standard tan British duffle coat and a slim modicum of makeup. She may have felt my recognizing gaze just behind her; and when she and her friend stood, she turned a full-face smile back toward me. She was after all nearly two years younger than I. I said “Merci, Mademoiselle Bardot” in my best French accent. I’d never been to France but had studied the language for two years at Duke. She gave me a charming bow, the others then recognized her, and we all shook hands (natives of the Romance-language world then shook hands as inevitably as the British fled the practice).
Had we been prepared for such an encounter—and I’m surprised that Vieri the diplomat wasn’t—we could at least have invited her and her companion for an espresso nearby; there was surely a caffe in reach. They were plainly our age and apparently at rather loose ends in Rome, Bardot was not yet (even in France) a raging celebrity, they might have joined us. But no. We parted in the lobby; and my chance at talking with one of the genuine film sensations of our time—and exercising my almost never tried French—vanished as she walked away, hand in hand with her friend in the chill, just-after-New-Year’s night.
Recalling those two good evenings, and a further dinner with Nicoletta and Olga, I’d say that our new Roman friends differed from our Oxford and American contemporaries most obviously in being a good deal more fashionably and expensively dressed, with an unspectacular self-dignifying elegance. Yet their warmth was unmistakably southern, and their curiosity about Jim and me—who we were, where we came from, what we intended to do with our lives—was very different from the then basic English tendency to go with what they could see about a stranger and ask him nothing more. Again their command of our language was embarrassingly excellent; and their appetite for pleasure seemed virtually identical to ours. The fact that Vieri Traxler was a few years older, and as I’ve only discovered in consulting Google while writing this page, he would ultimately become the Italian permanent representative to the United Nations (1989–1993) was not then visible to me or to Jim; and I hoped to see them again in time—as I hoped to see Rome, through the rest of my life.
After only a few months in England and a few weeks in Italy, I could say that these new Roman friends showed far fewer signs of World War II than my young Oxford colleagues and Britain in general—an entire country still in the grip of what might have been called advanced melancholia. Admittedly the Traxlers and their friends were financially secure; and their homes had surely not been bombed by Allied planes. Yet I sensed far fewer notes of depression from these technically defeated Italians than from the victorious British. The Brits of course were compelled to fight for their lives; but had they, in the end, been forced to pay too much for their survival? Well, Italy after all had been a unified nation for less than a century, whereas Great Britain had not only been unified since the reign of James I in the seventeenth century, it had ruled—and greatly benefited from—increasingly large portions of the planet for nearly two hundred years. Now that rule was rapidly ending.