Once I had a friend who had grown up in a series of military camps. They were rather bland fifties-flavor estates, dotted around the country. But they were secure, behind their barriers of wire and men with guns, and inside there were only service personnel and their families. There was no crime, no disorder, no graffiti or vandalism. Once he had grown up and completed his own service in the air force, my friend was finally expelled from his barbed-wire utopia. It seemed to me he spent his whole life after that looking back from our chaotic world at the little islands of order behind the wire. I had always known how he had felt.

And that was how I felt about the Crypt now. But there were conflicting emotions—yes, a desire to return, but at the same time a dread of being dragged back into that pit of faces, the scents, the endless touching.

I tried to express all this. Peter made Halloween gestures. “They’ll eat your soul!”

It wasn’t funny.

After we’d eaten, we strolled back toward the hotel. But it was a fine night, dusty and warm, and we were in Rome, for God’s sake. So we stopped at an alimentari, a grocery store, where I bought a bottle of limoncello. Close to the hotel there was a little square of greenery, with water fountains and cigarette butts and dog turds. We found a relatively clean bench and sat down. The limoncello was a lemon liqueur they manufactured down the coast near Sorrento. It was bright yellow and so sweet it stuck to your teeth. But it wasn’t so bad after the insides of our mouths were coated by the first couple of slugs, and it topped off the wine we had drunk.

The sky was smoggy that night, and glowed faintly gray-orange. There was plenty of light from the lamps that played on the monuments in the Forum and on the great gaudy Vittoriano. We were cupped by the great shoulders of Trajan’s Market, which loomed all around us.

I had taken a couple of walks around Trajan’s Market, which I found astonishing. You couldn’t say the ruins were attractive: the market was just a mound of brickwork, of streets and broken-open domes and little doorways. But it had been a shopping mall, for God’s sake. The little units—all neatly numbered and set on multiple levels along colonnaded passageways, or in great curving facades that would have graced the Georgians—had been planned and leased out, just like a modern development.