“He had come from Rome. ‘Oh, Rome?’ she exclaimed. ‘How lovely!’
He shrugged: ‘Too many nice people.’
She was surprised. He reflected on Roman society, but had enjoyed himself. Though not, evidently, a son of the Church, he was on the warmest of terms with it; prelates and colleges flashed through his talk, he spoke with affection of two or three cardinals; she was left with a clear impression that he had lunched at the Vatican. As he talked, antiquity became brittle, Imperial columns and arches like so much canvas. Mark’s Rome was late Renaissance, with a touch of the slick mundanity of Vogue. The sky above Rome, like the arch of an ornate altar-piece, became dark and flapping with draperies and august conversational figures. Cecilia — whose personal Rome was confined to one mildish Bostonian princess and her circle, who spent innocent days in the Forum displacing always a little hopefully a little more dust with the point of her parasol, who sighed her way into churches and bought pink ink-tinted freezias at the foot of the Spanish steps — could not but be impressed.”
Elizabeth Bowen, To the North
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
