I gaped at him, entirely without an answer. If I’d known Petrarka had written in Italian as well as Latin, I could have said I was interested because of that, but I’d had no idea. “We were just wondering what it sounded like,” I said, feebly. “It’s beautiful. And that’s such an interesting thought. Did you see her?”

He smiled. “She’d been dead for almost two hundred years before I read the poem.”

“It’s hard to understand the time things take, chronology, that kind of thing. The vast expanses of history.”

We had walked through the streets so that we were now outside the marble pillars of the entrance to the colosseum. Ficino stopped. “It’s especially hard because we’re at the wrong end of it, and because you’ve met people from so many different times. Why shouldn’t I have seen Laura, when we both lived in Florentia in the Renaissance, as if it was all one big party?”

“She could be here, or Petrarka could at least,” I said.

“Too good a Christian, for all that he loved classical learning,” Ficino said. “And he didn’t know Greek, so he couldn’t have read Plato. Before I translated his work, Plato was only a legend in Italy.”

“It’s so hard to imagine,” I said. “Ages without Plato. How wonderful that you could bring him back.” I wondered if my language gift could be used in that way.

Ficino smiled, and gestured to the colosseum. “Shall we go in?”

Inside, the colosseum descended in banks of earthwork seats down to a raked sand oval. They clearly used it as a palaestra, as there were weights stacked up ready for use. It was empty, and Ficino and I walked down the steps that divided seating sections from each other. I walked out onto the sand and sang a couple of lines from one of Father’s praise songs. “Good acoustics,” I said. “I expect they use it as a theater too.” Looking up, I saw that it was built of earth and marble, not concrete the way the colosseum in Rome is described.

“Probably they use it for all kinds of things,” Ficino said. “There are grills on the gates there, look.”

We walked over to the gates. There was a strange smell there too, musky and acrid. “Animals,” I said. “Do you think they have animal fights in here?”

“The Romans did,” Ficino said. “And clearly they do.” He was peering in through the grill. “I can see what might be a trident. Maybe they have Roman gladiatorial combat too.”

“But they seem so nice,” I said. I had to step back because the smell was making me feel queasy.

“Well, the Romans did it, and most of these Marissans are from the mainland and would be used to watching violent kinds of entertainment.” Ficino wasn’t as disturbed as I was. “I wonder what Aristomache thinks of it.”