“At least those of us who have had Agostini for Latin and Greek and have lived part of our lives in Rome. We’re privileged. . . . Not everyone has that.”

It was true. She thought with great pleasure of one special day in her Greek class when she and Agostini had both been on the same wavelengths of sensibility.

They were reading the beautiful passage of the Iliad in which Achilles, from whom Briseis, his companion, has just been taken away, sits by the shore and looks broodingly out over the boundless sea. Then, out of the blue, Signor Agostini asked, “What kind of a day do you think it was?” And only Tina, with utter assurance, had answered. “Misty,” she had said without hesitation. “Why do you say that?” Agostini asked, obviously pleased. “Well, you see,” she said, “Homer’s phrase ‘the boundless deep’ gives the impression of limitless immensity—hence a day of obscured horizons when everything blends together and boundaries merge to create the impression of ‘boundless.’”

As Tina recalled the day and scene, she felt again the thrilling quality of that exchange: Both she and Agostini had been together in the mind of Homer. It had not happened again.

Frieda Agostini was smiling when they came up to the house and Guido Agostini was stern-looking, more than ever the image of some great condottiere, Tina thought. He was a tall, big-shouldered, robust man who might have been a shepherd from the Abruzzi or a metal worker in a factory, not a teacher of the classics in an American prep school. His wife was small and gentle, a Swiss woman who made honey, bread, wine, and then rushed into Rome to deliver broadcasts of Italian news to Switzerland.

With his usual asperity, Agostini said, “Frieda’s just made a torta delle due farine.” Then his face relaxed into a smile at the joke of the two-flour cake.

He always told his Latin classes at St. Gregory’s that they hadn’t mastered Latin until they had deciphered Horace’s recipe for the ancient cornmeal cake and actually prepared it to his, Agostini’s, satisfaction. Tina had often experimented with her versions. Besides white flour and cornmeal flour, it called for almonds and quantities of butter. The extravagance used to make her mother furious. But it was Agostini’s idea of what cake should be: rustic, hearty, not overrefined—a test of character.

They had the torta with glasses of Agostini’s homemade wine on the terrace he had carved from his hillside, overlooking the hills of the spare Lazio region.

“I am trying to get Tina back into the classics, Signor Agostini,” Jason said. “I say she can’t be a classicist if she’s not been to Greece.”