Louis and Irene had a full day of touring coming up, so they left the party early. Marguerite suggested they stop by for cognac in the little room she worked in up on the roof-terrace of Angela’s apartment. A fabulous place, such as Rome excels in, Angela’s terrace overlooked the facade of Palazzo Spada with its exuberance of inscriptions, grotesques, and figures of Roman heroes. This night the palace and all of Piazza Capo di Ferro was floodlit and caught like sculpture by the lamps focused on it from an American movie crew.

They watched the shooting so that Irene could fill herself with impressions to relate back in Gloversville. Marguerite pointed out the cupolas of the Pilgrims’ church and hospice, the dark mass of the Monte di Pietà, the imposing bulk of Palazzo Farnese. Against the moonlit sky the equestrian statue of Garibaldi and the trees of the Janiculum stood out clearly, and from everywhere came the soft sound of fountains in the night. Almost to herself, Irene Longobardi, who passed in Gloversville for a woman who had everything, murmured, “I wish I were you, Marguerite.”

Below them were the sounds of the people who sat out on a mild night in the dark and narrow, odorous streets that led to Campo di Fiori.

Bontelli was right. His books read well, were full of spirit and humor and a freshness that had long been absent from recent Italian writing. Marguerite called to tell him.

“Let’s meet,” he said. “I’m free tomorrow—it’s a holiday. We could meet at Caffè Greco.”

When they met she said, “We’re the only people around. What is it today?”

“Corpus Domini.”

“What’s that?”

“God’s body.”

“Mamma mia!”

“Beh, pazienza.” He smiled and shrugged.

They were almost alone in usually crowded Greco’s; outside, the city was deserted, even there in Piazza di Spagna around the Spanish Steps. It gave their meeting a private, intimate aspect.

“What will you drink, signora?”

“Tea. It was chilly and a little damp in my room—I’ve just come from there.”

“What room?”

“A place where I work. I’ve fixed up a storage space on the roof of a friend’s apartment into a little studio.”

“What’s your work?”

“I started translating Alberto’s work into English and I do some other writers, too, from time to time. That’s my work, I suppose.” She sounded almost apologetic, as if not convinced that anything she did could be called work. Then she brightened, and looking at him steadily, said, “But what I’d really do, if I could, would be to work as a photographer and travel around shooting everything I saw.”

“Why don’t you? That’s a beautiful thing to do, you know.”

“I have a family,” she said. They fell silent. She tried to retrieve things. “Are you a real Roman, or like everyone else do you come from someplace else?”