A familiar scene: the Arno, the backdrop of lights on the Piazzale Michelangelo glittering in a Florentine night, the soft curve of hills outside the city, the shadowy bulk of Ponte Vecchio. It’s 1949 and Florence still has wartime scars; other than Ponte Vecchio, the bridges over the river are makeshift, and the areas adjacent to either bank are gutted shells; but the grimness lends itself to the essential toughness, the cult of grinta, in the Tuscan character.

It is a windy, chill evening of February; jammed in the throng crossing an improvised bridge are a balding, middle-aged Italian poet named Alberto Morosini and the American student of Italian, Marguerite Scalzo, in a bright green polo coat and wearing Gillo’s old beret over her long hair.

Alberto has gripped her arm and is talking vehemently of the life they could live together. Marguerite now knows Italian well enough to understand that. He stops abruptly, emphatically, every few steps to gesture and reinforce some point he is making. His words pour from him unimpeded by the streams of people passing in both directions, who brush by or collide with them. The progress of Alberto and Marguerite across the bridge seems agonizingly eternal to her. But she is, nonetheless, attentive to his proposal of marriage.

It would be hard to support her, he is saying, because she, an American, is used to a comfortable life and she has only to look around her—here he stops again and opens his arms toward the ruins on the riverbank—to see what condition Italy is still in. His teaching job in a Rome liceo, though prestigious and honorable and augmented by the courses he gives at the Dante Society, does not pay much. On the other hand, he contributes articles to leading cultural reviews and this is an important opening for him. He even has important friends in the Rome ministries. Everything would eventually work out. In the beginning they could live in the room he has in the apartment of his Danish bachelor friends.

What has led to this wild, windswept, shivering, jostled, dark-night proposal of marriage in a language she is still learning? Its improbability, and the improbability of Alberto Morosini, entrances Marguerite even though she knows the consecutive steps which have brought her where she is.