As soon as Barbara told her roommate that she was leaving her boyfriend for someone new, I started coming over before dinner, traveling along Via Casilina, by the light-rail tracks and the Roman aqueduct. If not for the traffic, my heart would have slowed down right then. The yellow and gray train cars, the stone pines, the ruins of arches with the barracks underneath, the Roman castles in the background that seemed distant with the sky a thin cobweb of pink and gray, or extremely close when it was clear out; sometimes, though, the sky was sticky with spun-sugar clouds. If there was a lot of traffic early on, then I’d only feel calmer once I turned right, by the carpenter’s shop, the air sweet with sawdust. That street ran along the high-speed rail line, and an abandoned mattress, worn down by the elements, was always lying in that desolate space by the tracks. After a hundred meters, you entered the area of that district where a small community lived, intimate, Roman, where everyone had known each other forever; the community accepted the foreigners quietly living there, the Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Romanians, who didn’t go to the bar on the piazza and lived in the ground-floor apartments. You’d see them in groups of no more than three, private communities, invisible, never projecting hostility. Then, there were the well-off Italians fleeing their middle-class neighborhoods. Where I grew up, people were always offended when someone else was double-parked; here, you could stop the car a moment and greet someone, and not get scolded by car horns. [I know—this isn’t the most urgent take on the complex issue of gentrification, by which I mean the bourgeois assault on working-class neighborhoods—but it does illustrate the feeling of paradise I experienced during those early days of love, even though the editor in me feels compelled to point out that I’ve painted this neighborhood like a colonial English gentleman might paint a “quaint” Indian village.]

The interior of the apartment was even better. Three rooms on the ground floor, and a steep wood staircase leading down to a basement room converted to a bedroom. This is where her friend lived, paying two hundred euros a month and still getting natural light through a glass door that led to a small cellar space dug out from the earth and covered in grids and glass panels.