A pity that …”

“Those mountains over there, aerial. . . almost fragile . . . Are they still the Albani?’’

“Apennines or Albani, don’t faint! You can ask Professor Litti over there. He’s an archaeologist.”

“And … and, excuse me, what do the mountains have to do with … with archaeology?” Litti asked a little resentfully.

“Professor, what are you saying!” exclaimed the Neapolitan. “Monuments of nature, of the most venerable antiquity. It’s a shame that . . . I was saying . . . It’s twelve-thirty, my oh my! I’m hungry.”

Signora Morlacchi grimaced in disgust from where she stood. She seethed in silence as she pretended to be enchanted by the marvelous landscape. The Apennines or the Albani? She didn’t know either, but why was the name important? No one understood “azure” poetry better than she. And she asked herself if the word for the Roman burial niche, columbarium . . . the austere columbarium, wouldn’t successfully capture the image of those Palatine ruins: blind eyes, shadowy eyes of the fierce and glorious ghost of ancient Rome, still vainly gazing there from the hill on the spectacle of the green bewitching life of this April from a far distant time.

Of this April from a far distant time . . .

Nice line! Dreamlike . ..

And she lowered her large, heavy eyelids over her gloomy, pale eyes, like those of a dying goat. There. She had managed to pluck the flower of a beautiful image from nature and history. Because of this she no longer regretted having lowered herself to honor Silvia Roncella, so much younger than herself, almost a beginner still, uncultured, totally unpoetic.

While thinking such thoughts, with a gesture of disdain, she turned her pale, coarse, worn face, with violently contrasting thick painted lips, toward those four, who were paying no attention to her. She straightened her back and lifted a hand overloaded with rings to lightly pat the strawlike fringe on her forehead.

Perhaps Zago was also pondering a poem, pinching the bristly black hairs under his lip. But in order to create he first needed to know many things.