Over four hundred Sunday friends, plus their friends, had gathered in the courtyard of old Pope Julian III’s splendid villa to cast their votes for the five finalists. Massimo was one of the five. The speculation was that he could be the winner but that Tomaso Campo’s Una Spirale de Bruma (“A Spiral of Mist”) was also a close contender. Nothing was sure.

Marguerite and Alberto were with Angela, Giorgio Corsi (back for the summer from New York), and the Ecclis. Angela, in a long white crocheted dress ordered sight-unseen from a peasant woman in Frascati and worn with nothing under it, was covering the affair for a woman’s magazine. Already at ten o’clock, when they arrived at Villa Giulia, confusion reigned and crowds were thick. The friends had originally met in the delicious inner courtyard called Ninfeo after the sunken lily-pool set among mossy niches supported by graceful caryatids, which must have greatly consoled the old pope (a great viveur, said Angela) as he strolled there of an evening saying his office. But now, with the additional hordes of friends, reporters, public relations people, and aides from the contending publishing houses who were there to engineer the award, the nymphaeum no longer was sufficient, and tables were set in the large outer courtyard where the older cadre walked about frowning and grumbling, “Who are all these people?”

The evening proceeded with Roman nonlogic, according to Giorgio Corsi, for whose academic mind such bizarreness was mysterious, foreboding. The number on their invitation did not correspond to their table reservation, but by some hopelessly complicated system only indicated a place on another list which then assigned them to a differently numbered table. The confusion made for a lot of promenading about and exchanging of places, and to Marguerite it was no longer a charming ploy that put the stunning people into greater evidence, but a typical Italian debacle.

The women wore dashing palazzo pajamas or short Pucci prints in glorious bursts of hot midsummer colors. Tanned young women with perfect bodies wore slinky Jean Harlow-type slip-dresses and sequin sheaths cut straight and split up the back. The princesses wore no jewelry, the actresses no makeup except for their enormous ornamental eyes.

Luigi Barzini presided over the head table of referees on an elevation at the far end of the courtyard; it was from there that votes were tabulated and numbers chalked on a giant blackboard. The commotion, the handshaking, the table hopping, and the late arrivals protracted the voting past midnight. Now and then Barzini’s voice would reverberate through the night soliciting voters. Hawk-eyed, he seemed to see everywhere. “Bassani!” he boomed through the microphone as that writer, like a communicant in a white summer suit, strode through the courtyard with his family trailing behind him. “Bassani, get up here, you haven’t voted yet!”