The da Vinci Airport is a few miles southwest of Rome. I got a cab to the city center. The driver might have been fifty. His face was like brown, crumpled leather. He seemed cheerful enough. He had a little wooden puppet hanging from his rearview mirror, like a red-painted Pinocchio.

We drove through rings of development. The outermost belt was the most modern, as you’d expect, a string of deeply ugly modern residential suburbs—tower blocks that would have shamed Manchester at its worst—and industrial sites, power plants, and other necessary but unattractive infrastructure. There were posters for British and American movies and pop stars, and an awful lot of kids in MANCHESTER UNITED soccer shirts and Yankees baseball caps. I could have been anywhere.

But within that concrete girdle there was a more attractive zone, of apartment blocks laid out around narrow roads and small greened squares. It looked like a nineteenth-century development. Here the traffic knotted up. My driver edged forward, honking, muttering, and gesturing.

We were close to the people now, pedestrians who squeezed their way along the narrow roads, mopeds that buzzed around us. Romans looked small, dark, round, a bit careworn. There was dirt and litter everywhere. Evidently the Romans had cleaned up their city in a great burst of enthusiasm to greet the year 2000. If that was so, I’d have hated to visit in 1999. The apartment blocks had rows of shuttered windows, and they were painted startlingly bright colors, yellow, orange, purple, even pink. It didn’t look British—colors like that don’t work well in the rain of London or Birmingham—still, I could have been in any great European city, I thought, in Paris or Brussels.

But then we reached the Aurelian Wall. “Mura, mura,” said the cabdriver, pointing. It was a great shoulder of brick, looming high above the road, dark, brooding, powerful, and the cars crept around its base like tinfoil toys. Even this first great slab could have absorbed all the scraps and fragments of wall I had seen in London, I thought, awed.

There was graffiti on the mura, though, in among the ads for trashy pop music and the political posters. I had no Italian, but I could recognize that the slogans were about immigrants and crime. The graffiti was everywhere, on every wall and doorway, every lamppost and bus shelter. Not the sign of a contented society.

I had twenty-four hours free before I was to meet Claudio Nervi, the tame Jesuit whose name I had extracted from Gina, and the resumption of my search for my sister. Twenty-four hours to decompress.

I had booked a hotel close to the Forum area, just like a regular tourist. The receptionist was a thin, neat young man in a black suit. His English was broken but serviceable: he was actually the first Italian I’d encountered since landing who had any English at all beyond a couple of words.