“You Americans,” he’d say affably, “the trouble with you Americans is that you read too much, see too much, listen too much, and want too much. You’re like geese stuffing yourselves to make intellectual foie gras.”

Marguerite knew he disapproved of her mindless energy, her helter-skelter accumulation of notions, facts, art reproductions—the merchandise of culture. In return, she esteemed his disapproval. She felt graceless at times with him; her walk too fast, her mind too logical, her curiosity too encompassing, her interests too immense. She felt the contrast of her American vigor with the twilight delicacy of this refined, civilized man, who, as he often declared proudly (completely unaware of the horror, to her, of his words), was the end product of a millennium, at least, of good, stolid middle-class Catholic tradition.

“You laugh at Americans because you already have your culture—it’s all around you,” she told him. “But we have to form ours.”

“What I have I owe to my friends,” he answered in a thoughtful way. “Before the war we spent beautiful times together talking and discussing. They opened my mind and taught me about writers and thinkers who were forbidden in Fascist Italy. Bertrand Russell. All the American writers. Even Croce was suspect. We were partisans in the war and only I’m left now. Eight friends! Killed fighting or taken away to concentration camps and never heard of again. It’s a loss I can never make up. The lines I have given to their memory in my poetry are nothing to what I owe them.”

Would she be able to give him as much? she wondered. Some things she was already learning from him. Once she got two tickets to a soccer game to be played in Renaissance costume in the Piazza della Signoria during the weekend of one of Alberto’s visits to her. When he arrived he was casually contemptuous of the idea: “Margherita, mia cara, just think—shabby little page boys and a whole tribune of fake De’ Medicis. Do you think we really want to spend our time that way when we might be making love?”

Then, to cheer her up, he said, “Let’s go up to Fiesole. On such a fine day we can eat out in a garden and then walk up to sit in the Roman amphitheater and talk.”

He bought her an armful of anemones from a street vendor, a straw hat to protect her from the strong sun, and they drank spumante at lunchtime and decided to stay overnight. It was the day he really married her, he would always say later, in their own ceremony in the cool interior of the abbey church they visited.

Later that night she slipped out of bed and took the unused soccer tickets from her bag. Getting back under the covers with Alberto, she tore them into little pieces and sprinkled them over him. “Every wedding needs confetti,” she said.