Fear flashed across the thief’s face. The woman screamed. “Martin, that man has your wallet!”

The tourist spun around. “Hey!”

The pickpocket, his wrist still in Ross’s grasp, dropped the wallet. As the bus slowed for the next stop, the thief yanked his hand from Ross and jumped off the bus, knocking an elderly woman over as he did so. He quickly disappeared down a side street.

The man stooped down and picked up his wallet. “That was close,” he said to Ross. “Thank you.”

“Give him a reward, Martin,” the woman said.

He fished a couple of ten-thousand-lire bills from his wallet and offered them to Ross.

Ross waved them off. “No, grazie.”

“I insist.”

“Say, insist-a. Just add an ‘a’ to it, sometimes they understand that.”

Ross just waved. “Veramente, no.”

“I don’t think he wants it,” Martin said to his wife. He turned to Ross. “Well, I sure as heck appreciate it,” he said, shoving the thick wallet into the same back pocket it had just been lifted from. “Grand-ay gra-zee.”

“Prego,” Ross said again. They stood in silence as the bus jogged along, until a few minutes later, when the woman pointed ahead. “There’s the big dome up ahead. I think the next one’s our stop.”

A moment later the couple stepped from the bus, and turned back before the doors closed. “Grazee, again.”

Ross smiled. “There are a lot of pickpockets in Florence, sir. It’s best to leave a wallet that big in your hotel.”

The couple just stared at him in wonder as the door closed.

At the next stop Ross stepped off the bus and walked a half block to the Uffizi.

Even before he entered the gallery’s courtyard he could feel his mood begin to change.

The Uffizi was more than a gallery to Ross, it was a temple, and standing before its art was a religious experience.

During his darkest hours, when faith deserted him, art had been his closest link to divinity and it still sustained him. He felt his work a calling in the same way some feel a calling to preach the word. That is what he was, he decided—a preacher, expounding the divinity of art. Though more times than not his pearls were cast before swine, before those too jet-lagged and culture-shocked to hear, but sometimes his sermons fell on willing ears, and he saw the light come into their eyes, and sometimes tears, and that was when he was happiest.

By nine o’clock Ross had completed his first tour of the day. His second group canceled. Their tour bus had broken down in Siena, and Ross had waited in the courtyard for nearly an hour before Francesca found him and gave him the news. He took coffee at a bar in Piazza della Signoria then went out to the city to purchase a scooter.

His first week in Italy he had decided that riding a scooter on the Italian roads was akin to a death wish, but he had since repented of the thought. A scooter was the only practical way around Florence. After a little while he found one he liked, a Piaggio Vespa, black and yellow like a wasp. He bought a helmet and lock and drove out of the dealership feeling more like a native. He drove to the northeast perimeter of Florence, upward to the hills of San Domenico and Fiesole. He stayed awhile in Fiesole, toured the Etruscan amphitheater and tombs. The town square, Piazza Mino, was as beautiful as he had been told it was, but there were too many tourists, so he drove back down from the hills, across the Arno toward Rendola.