“Let’s get together, Tina. What about going to see Signor Agostini?”

“I’d like that, Jason.”

“I’ll give you a call. Ciao!”

He stood and waved as she went off. He does look like a pirate, she thought. She liked his looks.

They went to Signor Agostini’s the hard way, taking the 62 bus from the Corso to the end of its line at the little San Pietro train station near the Vatican, where they got the train for all the small stops outside Rome. They had done it before, separately, as had most of the St. Gregory’s students that Signor Agostini had in his Latin and Greek classes.

Guido Agostini was more than just a classics teacher. He had been for Tina a maestro della vita, the great teacher of her life. He was the reason she had found her life’s work.

And now she was going to see him not as she had done in former years—as an excuse to have a day in the country hearing his witty and learned conversation and eating good things accompanied by his own wine—but as if she were casting auspices and he would read the divination. Somehow she expected from Signor Agostini a message which, like the sibyl’s, could be variously interpreted; but she would divine the meaning intuitively and would follow it.

From the station at Porta Rossa, Jason and Tina walked the short distance over the countryside toward the hill where Signor Agostini had enlarged and renovated an old shepherd’s cottage into a modern dwelling for himself and his wife. He was an idealist, he told his Latin classes, hopelessly practicing the virtues of the old Republic while engulfed in the vice of modern-day democracy. He was a tough old bird, a demanding and invigorating intelligence who had taught his select group of St. Gregory students—gli scelti, “the chosen,” he called them—a toughness and discipline they didn’t know they had until he demanded it from them.

“Why do you suppose we’re tramping out here to see old Guido?” Tina asked rhetorically, knowing that she wanted no answers, that the day itself and the country were answer enough.

“What we really should be doing is hitching to Greece and Turkey and seeing the places that Agostini has been preaching about to us since ninth grade,” Jason answered.

“Maybe we can join forces; I was going to Calabria this summer and that’s a start in the right direction—Magna Graecia, you know. But do you mean hitching with knapsacks and all that?” Tina asked.

“Sure. I’ve already done it to Yugoslavia. It’s quite nice, actually. And Calabria’s fine—right on the way to the boat at Brindisi.”

“Will there be good food?” Tina asked. “I always remember my trips in terms of the meals I encounter. I have an almost exclusively gustatory memory.”

“You’re spoiled, Tina. What kind of an SDS person were you?”