The thunderstorm had long passed, but the streets of Roccasale were still wet from the rain when the bus from the Chieti train station rumbled into the center of town.When the door opened and Carter descended to the street, he found a large puddle of water separating the bottom step of the bus from the sidewalk. He turned to ask the driver if he would move the bus forward a bit, but then thinking better of it, he simply tightened his grip on his bags and with one leap cleared the puddle. Before he could turn around to be certain he had not dropped anything on the bus steps when he took flight, the door hissed closed behind him, and the bus rumbled away.

His bags in hand, Carter stood there alone on the sidewalk, looking about for a few moments. Roccasale, he saw, was not a terribly big place when compared to the cities from which he had just come, but it was not so small, either.The main street, on which he had been deposited, was lined with shops. People were bustling in and out of the stores, and cars zoomed up and down the street past him at alarming speeds before disappearing around the corner. Carter was by now an experienced pedestrian. He rightly assumed that the streets of Roccasale were no safer for him than the streets of Rome. As he set off to find a hotel, he reminded himself to keep to the sidewalk and out of harm’s way.

There was, Carter discovered, only one hotel in Roccasale, the Hotel Risorgimento. He found it at the end of the street, near the edge of the town’s piazza. It was a very small hotel, run by a lively diminutive elderly couple, who seemed mildly astonished at having a guest when he came to check in. The two made a great fuss over him, marveling at how well he spoke Italian, and asked him endless questions about where in America he came from and how on earth he happened to be traveling through Roccasale of all places. Despite their assurances that he would have the best room in the house, Carter had not been overly optimistic about what kind of accommodations he would find when he finally carried his bags up the stairs. To his pleasant surprise, however, his room turned out to be bright and airy, and the window opened to a nice view of the piazza below. Oddly enough, it was the nicest room he had stayed in since he arrived in Italy, and he could not have been more pleased.