In horse-and-carriage days, foreign visitors to Rome, after an arduous Alpine crossing, commonly entered the city from the north, by the Milvian Bridge which has existed since the second century B.C. Here, on October 28, 312, Constantine had a vision of Christ on the eve of his victory over his rival, Maxentius. Since that time, travelers have complained of this dusty and uninspiring approach to the Eternal City: In 1764, Edward Gibbon noted that “The approach to Rome is not pleasing.”

Air travel may have its virtues after all. My first sight of the Mediterranean was through a January haze beneath which stony brown islands punched ragged holes in a satin sea; for me, Gibbon’s “abord du Rome” was the parallel lines of creamy waves breaking softly on the beach off the right wing of the plane as it coasted down its computerized slope of air toward the green fields, terra-cotta walls, and tiled roofs of Fiumicino and Leonardo da Vinci Airport, adjacent to the village. I had my passport stamped by an impassive Italian immigration agent and went on to baggage claim, where the first Romans I met were a pair of Mormon missionaries from Ogden, Utah.

Within the hour, my colleagues Chris Check and Aaron Wolf of The Rockford Institute and our guests, Ruth Besemer of Boulder, Colorado, and Rick and Linda Zanocco of Rockford, arrived on an American Airlines flight from Chicago. At 8:30 in the morning, after more than eight hours in flight from Detroit and countless bottles of free French wine, I was especially happy to see Chris, who had arranged for a van to take us from the airport to the hotel. Everyone had the vague out-of-body expression of people coming off a transatlantic flight, but nevertheless felt an almost supernatural enthusiasm to get on to Rome.

Intermittent showers fell from a sky like a Renaissance painting, egg-shell blue with smears of pink and yellow cloud above rounded green hills crowned by groves of the spreading, flat-crowned Roman pines, with here and there a palm tree or two. The driver took the superstrada into the city, following the Tiber River northeastward in the direction of built-upon hills and a succession of looming church domes, each one of which resembled—but was not—the vaster dome of St. Peter still many miles away. We passed the Basilica of St. Paul Without the Walls, where the Apostle is buried only a few kilometers from the site of his martyrdom, and shortly afterward crossed from the west to the east bank of the river. The van skirted the Circus Maximus, past the Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill, and rounded the monument to Victor Emmanuel II. The outer shell of the age-darkened Colosseum, a dim and broken hulk, loomed briefly through the rain and Trajan’s Column flashed before my eyes before the van darted into a maze of cobbled narrow streets, descended a hill above the Forum of Augustus, and pulled up before the Hotel Forum on the Via Madonna del Monti. Tom Fleming, having arrived with Gail two days before New Year’s, stood in the lobby with an expression suspiciously like that of a man waiting for the bar to open. By 11:00 in the morning, Roman time, the French wine had worn off, but Fausto the barman didn’t come on duty for another hour yet.

“I’m going upstairs for a lie-down,” I told Tom.

He gave me a look of the kind we Westerners reserve for greenhorns who attempt to mount their horse from the wrong side.

“That’s not something I would advise you to do. Did you take your melatonin before getting on the plane?”

I muttered something about the pagan environmentalists in Laramie having cornered the melatonin market for their winter-solstice rites and escaped to my room while Tom was greeting Ray Olson from Chicago. The room had a tiled floor, a good-sized bath, and windows opening onto a balcony from which I had a view of tiled rooftops supporting what by February or March would be an irregular but nevertheless impressive hay crop. Without stopping to unpack, I turned down the counterpane and fell asleep across the wide and comfortable bed. When I awoke, the light beyond the window was fading, and I had missed Tom’s walking tour to somewhere. (Every Thos. Fleming production abroad demands from its participants the strenuous—one might say merciless—exercise of the calf and thigh muscles, as well as the little gray cells. This trip was to prove no exception to the rule.)

We went for supper—Tom and Gail Fleming, Srdja Trifkovic, Clyde Wilson and his daughter Ann, and I—on the other side of the Colosseum at Pasqualino on Via de Quattro Santi Coronati, where the pasta was homemade and the food superb, though the conversation (the company seemed agreed on the probability of George W. Bush being the last “conservative” president) was somewhat depressing. Suspicious stares from a gentleman at a table across the room confirmed that the restaurant, to which Chris Kopff had introduced Tom a couple of years before, was a neighborhood hangout of the first caliber; in fact my orate, a Mediterranean fish finely grilled, and pasta with lentils (something, it occurred to me, even I could attempt at home) did not disappoint. From Pasqualino, we wandered in the dark along the Via dei Fori Imperiali, between the floodlit bulk of the Colosseum and the site where Nero’s Golden Palace once stood, in the direction of the hotel, where the party turned in. All of it, that is, but Srdja, Thomas, and myself “Gentlemen,” Srdja proposed, “shall we take a walk?”

Turning our backs on the Arch of Constantine, electrically illuminated under a waxing moon, we set out on a midnight walk in the opposite direction across the darkened city: past Trajan’s Column and the Palazzo Venezia with its solitary balcony made famous by Benito Mussolini; the Trevi Fountain (also floodlit and surrounded by lovers, photographers, and people tossing coins into the water); the Pantheon (looming suddenly out of the night around a corner); thence to the Via del Corso, from where the sight of the distant Vittorio Emmanuele (nicknamed locally the “Wedding Cake” or, even more appropriately’, the “Typewriter”) gave us our bearings back to the hotel. The Romans stay out late at night, sauntering past the open shops, the restaurants, the hostarias, birrerias, and trattorias, all of them filled with eminently purchasable, edible, or potable things. (“So much to eat, so little time to do it in,” as Clyde Wilson later remarked.) From being raised in Manhattan, I’ve acquired the survival instincts of an Apache warrior, yet at no time in our nocturnal perambulation did I sense the familiar prick of danger lurking near. Only the pigeons, wheeling in flocks above the floodlit buildings, seemed agitated. Back at the hotel, we sat up drinking pear brandy (“Vilsamovka”) from Serbia in Srdja’s room for half an hour before I called my first night in Rome a day, and turning in.

At seven the next morning, I sat eating white-bread rolls and fruit and drinking black coffee in the roof restaurant above the hotel while shadows drained from the Roman Forum and the rising sun illuminated the massy green foliage surmounting the Palatine, Capitoline, and Aventine Hills, pinked the brick towers, and fired the marble façades on the Janiculum across the Tiber. After breakfast I took a taxi, together with Mrs. Besemer and the Zanoccos, across town to Vatican City, where I had my first look at St. Peter (from the Piazza) and we walked through the Vatican Museum, rather fussy and academic except for the wonderful tapestries depicting most realistically the Slaughter of the Innocents and seeming to pull you inside the picture (somewhere you felt you really would prefer not to go). The tour ends in the Sistine Chapel, filled, only a few days past New Year’s, with Jubilee pilgrims and where the authorities request you (rather unrealistically) not to talk. When, on the way back across the Tiber, I recognized Padre Pio’s face stuck on the windshield, the driver gave me a sticker like it to affix to my own vehicle. “Molto importante, Padre Pio,” he assured me, taking my hand as I left the cab. For lunch, I went round with the Flemings, Terry and Mary Kohler, and Ray Olson to the Taverna Romana a block from the hotel, where the pasta was again homemade and they gave you jerkied pork, together with sheep cheese and salami, for an antipasto; our relatively simple lunch turned out to be one of the best meals I was to enjoy in Rome. The luncheon conversation, as usual, covered many topics, among which I especially recall Tom quoting the Holy Father whom history reports as saying, “Since God has given us the papacy, we propose to enjoy it.”

All play and no work flunks Jack out of the Academia Fleming, so at 1:30 sharp that afternoon we got down to business in the conference room of the Hotel Forum with a talk by Dr. Fleming on the legends of early Rome, followed by Gail Fleming speaking on Roman myth and ritual. (She reminded us that Roman success was produced by the Roman character, which itself was formed by the Roman religion.) The audience’s reward for its hard intellectual concentration was a slog through the rain while I caught up further on my sleep, awaking in late afternoon to the sound of water pouring from the surrounding roofs. The walking party, returning soaking wet below the knees, went upstairs to change while I patiently awaited them in the hotel bar over a Prosecco or two. Around suppertime, Srdja Trifkovic showed up, thus resolving the mystery of his absence all day from the proceedings, which Tom had uncharitably attributed to the pear brandy. Not katzenjammer but the erasure of his talk from his laptop computer had kept him from us, as he labored for hours in solitary confinement to recreate the text of the original speech.

We got to hear the reconstruction next morning: In “From Republic to Empire,” Srdja characterized empire as the product of what he called “the neurotic desire to control all reality.” The idea of a Christian empire he dismissed as oxymoronic, empires being unitarian in nature, nations trinitarian. The imperial loathing for organic communities is the spirit of Antichrist, bent on making all people and societies subject to the same plan. Rome’s hubristic program, Srdja asserted, though finally a failure, has haunted Europeans ever since. The morning’s other talk, “Cicero, Cato, Clodius, and Caesar,” was delivered by Tom Fleming. He ended it with a rousing passage from Addison’s Cato—something about an hour of virtuous liberty being worth more than an eternity of tyranny—before school let out and we all went off to eat. .. again.

In the afternoon, I experienced my first real disruption and breakdown of the ongoing, uncertain tango between the English and the Italian languages I’d been observing since my arrival in Rome. Aaron and I had engaged a Pronto taxi to ride over with Ruth Besemer to the Capitoline Museums, which Tom had described as being a two-minute ride from the Hotel Forum. Confident after several months’ study of the Berlitz Italian Self-Teacher, I launched into what ought to have been fluent and precise directions, delivered in the local dialect. But the driver didn’t know where the Musei Capitolini were. Nor did he know a word of English. Instead, he took both hands off the wheel of the cab as it guided itself at high speed around the Piazza Venezia to make a scribbling motion, as on a pad of paper. “Addresse? he suggested, scowling. So he did know one word—sort of. Only we didn’t have anything that corresponded with it to give him. The taxi was in the Via del Plebiscite now, headed into the Corso; already four minutes from the hotel and out of sight of the Capitoline Hill. I looked at Aaron; Aaron looked at me. It’s amazing how in a crisis of this sort your brain either shuts down or defaults to foreign languages previously studied, in my case French and Spanish, in that order. “How do we tell him to stop?” Aaron asked, but I couldn’t tell him. Either I ranked well toward the bottom of Signor Berlitz’s class, or I deserved my money back. In the end, whether deliberately or not, the driver did the smart thing, delivering us to the Piazza S. Pietro, which typically has enough taxis waiting to convey the entire Italian Army to the Austrian front. Here, we swapped horses and rode back to the Capitoline Museums, overlooking the hotel across the Roman Forum. The museum had some fine frescoes depicting scenes from Roman history, but for me the high point of the visit was Chris Check’s near-arrest by a mettlesome guard when he took a flash photograph of Aaron and me before an imposing hermaphroditic statue.

From the Capitoline, we descended to the Roman Forum below. “I trod,” Gibbon had written, “with lofty step, the ruins of the forum; each memorable stop where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation.” And to his father: “Whatever ideas books may have given us of the greatness of that people, their accounts of the most flourishing state of Rome fall infinitely short of the picture of its ruins. I am convinced there never never existed such a nation and I hope for the happiness of mankind that there never will again.” As for our party, we inspected the Arch of Septimius Severus (the marble relief all but obliterated by weather on its southern exposure), the Rostra (where Cicero’s head, hands, and tongue were displayed), the remains of the Vestal Virgins’ temple and altar, the Curia (Caesar would have been stabbed here had the building not been under reconstruction in 44 B.C.)… What is there to add to Gibbon’s reaction? In a wide puddle below the steps of the Curia, a gaggle of young girls dressed in parochial-school uniforms waded, giggling as they wetted their sky-blue shoes in the muddied water.

During the following days, we continued to hear talks (“Images of the Apocalypse” by James Patrick, “Roman Spies and Spies in Rome” by Srdja Trifkovic, “The Age of the Martyrs” by Aaron Wolf, “The Making of Papal Rome” by Marco Respinti, “Good Popes/Bad Popes” by Chris Check, “Pio Nono and His Enemies” by Alberto Carosa, “The Papacy” by Roberto de Mattel, “Why I Don’t Live in Rome” by Andrei Navrozov, “Italian Lessons From E.M. Forster” by Tom Fleming) early in the morning and late in the afternoon, in between times visiting three of the four major Roman basilicas (S. Maria g Maggiore, S. John Giovanni in Laterno, and, of course, S. Pietro in Vatican City), the Pantheon and the Piazza Navona, S. Clemente, a number of churches in Trastevere, the Piazza Bocca della Verità, and the Villa Borghese, among other places. We continued to eat superbly, enjoying a three-hour lunch at Goffredo on the Via Panispenra after hearing Mass celebrated by three bishops at S. Maria Maggiore and a fine fish dinner at le Tavernelle (the Mediterranean boasts several delicious species unknown to North American waters). One evening, as a guest of the Kohlers together with the Flemings and Gary Hofmeister and Jo Anne Carmony of Indianapolis, I enjoyed a splendid supper at La Cisterna in Trastevere. (jAfterward, we were given a tour of the cistern below the restaurant and treated to an entirely redundant glass of Prosecco.)

On Sunday, with the Flemings, Terry and Mary Kohler, Paul Oberbeck and Kathy Pfeiffer, and the Zanoccos, I heard Mass at SS. Cosmas and Damian overlooking the Roman Forum; after the usual elaborate pranzo and another talk, we went walking downtown to see how Romans spend Sunday afternoon. Rome, I discovered, enjoys her Sundays and knows how to make the most of them — outside of church, that is. Major arteries are closed to traffic, the streets flock with pedestrians strolling, eating, and dropping into the innumerable shops that remain open, the Pantheon, and other landmarks not closed for the Sabbath. Somber colors (blues, browns, and black) are currently in vogue among Roman women, who seem divided into two types: the stone knockouts, plainly of the haute bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, and the furtively cute and homely, who are just as obviously not. Under one of those wonderfully mixed Roman skies, I took a walk on the Quirinal Hill, past the Pope’s summer palace where a uniformed military band played to a large and enthusiastic crowd, then descended by narrow, curving, cobbled streets to the Trevi Fountain, in the vicinity of which I dropped into an hostaria for a glass of wine and a pastry. Lovely Italy, wonderful Rome, where you can walk all day for days without having your aesthetic eye offended, not even once. To paraphrase Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Italy every object is either a work of art, or the raw material for one.

Rome receives twice as much rain annually as does London, the difference being that the Eternal City measures its precipitation over a period of days rather than months. It was on one of these days, strongly recalling the Flood, that we visited St. Peter’s and the Necropolis beneath it. The great cathedral was—for me, at least—a disappointment. The visual magnitude of its proportions having been deliberately reduced by architectural tricks, the edifice simply does not appear as gigantic as it certainly is (size being the only thing that impressed Mark Twain about the place), while the interior, except for Bernini’s splendid baldachin above the high altar, is strangely cold, almost to the point of grimness. And the four statues in the Piers of the Crossing—SS. Longinus, Veronica, Helena, and Andrew—also by Bernini looked to me as if they had been carved from soap. On the other hand, the Crucifix Chapel (Bernini again) with its golden window is living baroque, Michelangelo’s Picta in the Picta Chapel is more alive than life even though one of its two figures is dead, and I experienced an incommunicable thrill, entirely unexpected, at standing upon the circular stone medallion, of an almost imperial purple and only slightly cracked, where Charlemagne stood to receive from the Pope the crown of Holy Roman Emperor. (The event took place in the Basilica of Constantine on whose site St. Peter’s stands, the stone itself having been removed to the new building.) Still, most moving for me finally was the great number of confessionals—carved from mahogany or another dark wood and scattered about the marble flooring like bathing machines on a beach, each with its sign designating one of a Babel of languages—where people from all around the world kneel to confess their sins, each in his own sinful tongue. This was the spectacle which caused the Puritan Hawthorne, who found St. Peter “terribly” disappointing for “its want of effect,” to note afterward in his journal his opinion that “a great deal of devout and reverential feeling is kept alive in people’s hearts by the Catholic mode of worship.”

We were given a tour of the Scavi or Necropolis—my party by a fresh-faced young seminarian from Omaha—over which Constantine’s basilica was built and viewed, through a subterranean window, the Confessio beneath the high altar where the bones of St. Peter rest. It was a solemn moment in a solemn, indeed a hallowed, place—but again, not so poignant to my mind as the obelisk in the Piazza S. Pictro, brought to Rome in A.D. 57 by Caligula, who set it up in his circus. It is said to be the last thing Peter, hanging upside down on a cross, saw before his martyrdom.

Then it was mealtime again, as it always seems to be in Italy, and my co-suffering spiritual nature was suppressed once more by temptation in the form of a sumptuous pranzo, I no longer remember what or where.

Like time put on fast-forward by increasing age, the tempo of our visit appeared to accelerate with the passing of the days, until the week collapsed into a I blur of successive sensations and impressions from which I can recall Marco Respinti arguing that the unification of Italy in reality was the most divisive event in its history, making it necessary for Italians to rediscover and revive their own culture and tradition; and Tom Fleming concluding, in his brilliant appreciation of E.M. Forster and Forster’s Italian novels (A Room With a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread), that

The communists and expatriates are wrong: Loving Italy is not incompatible with loving your own country, your own hometown. This was something the ancients understood . . . They could, like Diocletian, govern the known world and never give up their longing for their native province . . . I hope that you have learned some of these lessons from this week—all too brief that it has been—in the greatest city the world has ever known.

I recall, too, visiting S. Cecilia in Trastevere (the little habited nun so disappointed when we gave her only the sum she requested for the tour), walking with the Flemings beneath the plane trees on and in the neighborhood of the Viale Trastevere, Gail and I enviously eyeing the penthouse gardens overhead, and pranzo at La Ceccha, where Andrei Navrozov led us (an old Mafia favorite, he explained, hung with more garlic than you could grow on ten hectares and, in the nature of things, somewhat pricey). I recall strolling on the east bank of the swift flowing tawny Tiber, past the Isola Tiberina as far as the Piazza della Bocca della Verita and S. Maria in Cosmedin, where the Bocca itself resides. The Bocca della Verita, or Mouth of Truth, is a large stone medallion (originally a drain cover) with the likeness of a man’s face, openmouthed: Legend has it that the liar who thrusts his hand into the mouth will have it bitten oft. (Thinking that every writer ought to have one, I bought a small plaster replica of the Bocca to carry home with me.) Finally, I recall the last day in Rome, a day to myself, in which to look around on my own—and shop, like any good American. A man can’t visit Rome without bringing back something pretty for the ladies.

The weather having turned cool under a gray sky, I wore a topcoat and hat for my walk along the Corso. (Unlike in Milan last spring, the modified Stetson with the pewter elk-head hat pin I wear on trips to the East Coast and abroad seemed an object less of hostility than of curiosity in Rome.) Buying presents for women is something I enjoy, and am practiced at. In a boutique I had previously noticed near the Piazza del Gesù, I found a lovely wool scarf for Jennifer Lucas (its shade of blue just matching her blue eves) in Michigan, and only a few doors away a woolen pancha, a kind of long serape bordered by tassels, for Rhonda Stevenson in California, the burgundy dye a perfect offset for her brown ones.

What a woman would have needed an entire afternoon and the following morning to accomplish, I had taken care of in a quarter of an hour. With my packages under my arm and a few hours’ free time left, I looked in at the church of S. Andrea della Valle, begun in 1591 and completed by Carlo Maderno, a side chapel of which is ftie setting for the first act of Tosca. (A production by the Metropolitan Opera in the 1970’s had a black iron gate with gilded points between the chapel and die nave; one exactly like it closes off the first chapel to your left as you enter the church.) From S. Andrea, I proceeded along the Corso as far as the Route Vittorio Emmanuele II, where—within sight of the Castel S. Angelo (from whose parapet Tosca throws herself into the Tiber)—I turned left along the riverbank in search of the Cenci Palace. The Cenci—a noble family which became 2 extinct in 1599 when Pope Clement VIII himself ordered its surviving members executed for the murder of the patriarch, Count Cenci—was still a source of fascination for Romans when Shelley visited the city around 1820 and as late as the 1850’s when Hawthorne spent a winter there. Intrigued himself by this historical tragedy, from which he wrung strongly antipapal conclusions, Shelley wrote a play about the beautiful Beatrice who, after being ravished by her father, conspired with her mother and brother to murder the depraved count. From the Lungotevere d. Vallati, I turned into the Via Aremila and from there into a warren of narrow crooked streets among which I found the Palazzo Cenci, still a sprawling pile of masonry but not nearly so forbidding now as when Shelley saw it, the building having been painted a creamy yellow and converted into residential apartments. Only the blackened shadowy arch connecting the two portions of the palace across a narrow cobbled street retains a hint of the monstrous Baroque crimes that occurred here four centuries ago.

From the Palazzo Cenci, I made my way back to the Hotel Forum, between the northern end of the Palatine Hill and the Campidoglio. Except for the tall brick arches set into the hillside beneath the massed green of the cypresses and the darker pines above them, the palaces of the emperors and the ancient Roman aristocracy have to be imagined today. The Forum below the hill was green with January grass and forbs which I hated to be leaving for the snow and ice of Wyoming.

At the hotel that evening, we had a fine Roman feast, with a cocktail pianist thrown in by a generous management. Most of the guests were departing on early flights the next morning, and after the goodbyes had been said, the Rockford Rump Parliament, consisting of all the usual suspects, gathered in the bar downstairs for scotch and to say farewell to Fausto, the indulgent keeper of our livers for the past eight or nine days. I regret to say that I (but not I alone) had too many scotches, got to bed well after midnight, and would have got up at six in the morning with a serious headache had I not, in fact, awoken drunk. I was still drunk when Ray Olson and I arrived together at the airport at nine. Whether it was with last night’s scotch or with the haunting, eternal beauty that is Rome, I could not have said.