Afternoons in Rome, often, hungry-like, we picked and pecked at snacks on the go. We sat on steps and benches. We perched on handrails. From Il Fornaio one day, a hop and a skip down from the Campo dei fiori, we got mortadella sandwiches, salty and meaty and wrapped in brown waxed paper. We sat by the fountain with our backs to the sun, and the water mist on our arms. We couldn’t move for happiness. We carried Giolitti cones after, pink and green and blackberry purple.



We walked in the gardens, we laughed at the little dogs, we did everything and nothing at the same time. I must have stopped in every stationery shop we saw, drawn in by the delicate, gold-engraved notecards and the cardboard marionette theatres – so many knights and jesters, so many princesses hanging from fine, white threads.

One afternoon on via Giulia, I remember, there was the smell of baking in the street. A woman bent at the waist and put her eye to the crack between uneven doors. We looked in at the antique stores, their brass lamps and handsome trunks and glassy-eyed dolls, and we walked under the arch with the lush, green vines hanging low. We crossed the ponte Sisto as, just ahead of us, a flock of small birds swooped in the wind. At home, we napped under white sheets while the sound of an accordion floated up from the lane. “Why,” Olive said, and he was dozy, and I was dozy, “is someone playing the theme from ‘The Godfather’?” The curtain was a gauzy white, knotted in the middle to keep from sweeping the floor. We woke after sundown, in time for prosecco and saladini at a table outside. The night unfurled and spread her wings around us.