Edmund was not struck by the women of Rome, whose beauty, he thought, did not match their city’s. He remembered a remark of Boswell’s that only a few Roman women were pretty, and most of the pretty ones were nuns. But he was not above letting James introduce him to courtesans, of whom he seemed to know a great number. Edmund had not come here for debauchery, but he was no monk, and he had to admit it was a peculiar thrill to indulge his carnal appetites here in the home of the mother church—where, he learned, some of the prostitutes actually carried licences issued by the pope himself!

But all that changed when he met Minerva.

One night he took in an operette at the Capranica. It was hard to make out the performance for the drinking and gambling going on in the private box James had hired. James introduced him to the raucous company of the singers and actors, and in the course of a very long evening Edmund was astonished to learn that some of the beautiful “girls” who mingled with the company were in fact castrati. Happily he avoided making a fool of himself.

The next morning, his head more than usually cloudy, Edmund walked alone to the Forum.

He found a fallen column to sit on. The Forum was a meadow littered with ruins. He watched the hay carts lumbering across the open space, and animals grazing among the lichen-coated ruins. As the rising sun banished the last of the morning mist, despite his mildly aching head, he felt tranquility settle on him. It was a scene of ruin, yes, and there was poignancy in seeing the shabby huts of carpenters erected on the rostrum where once Cicero had stood. But there was great peace here, as if the present had somehow made a settlement with the past.

In one corner of the ancient space a bank of charcoal stoves had been set up, and he could smell the sour stink of cabbage and tripe. Idly he stood, brushed lichen from his trousers, and wandered that way. There were many places in Rome where you could find food being cooked in the open. Some of these open-air establishments were grand, and Edmund had enjoyed adequate lunches of salad, poached fish, cheese and fruits, rounded off with the ice cream with which the Romans seemed obsessed. But he could see that these cabbage cookers had humbler culinary ambitions than that, and that the wretched folk who clustered around the stoves were the poorest of the poor.

At first he thought the women working at the stoves must be nuns, for they wore simple white robes laced with purple thread. But they wore no wimples or hoods, and he saw that they were all young, all rather similar, almost like sisters—and all pale, as if they wore cosmetics of theatrical thickness.

That was when he saw Minerva.