The Crass, Beautiful Eternal City
It is hard to read Hughes on his first experience of Rome without thinking of another foreign visitor’s plunge into that same irresistible mix of sensual pleasure and shattering beauty: it was that same year, 1959, when Anita Ekberg made her majestic progress through the waters of the Trevi Fountain for the young director Federico Fellini’s film La dolce vita , trailed by a mesmerized Marcello Mastroianni, himself as beautiful a creature as the buxom Swede and the mewing white kitten she has been carrying through the dark, silent streets as she looks for a dish of milk. It is hard to believe that those streets were ever so still, or so mysterious, but in fact I remember a man standing on one of those same corners in the late 1970s, selling bouquets of violets, each flower’s delicate stem carefully tied to a bit of palm frond with a wrap of thread to fill out the nosegay. (He is a neighbor of mine now, and long retired, his mobile face, with its black eyes, still one of the most wonderfully expressive sights the city has produced.)