A-Roma

Every city has its signature smell--some strange potpourri of local earths and waters and human habits. All this past fortnight I could smell Rome again, wherever I was: an absolutely distinctive stew of honey, lemon, damp stone, a discreet backdrop of pine sap, and beneath it all, a benign note of decay, as though something had gone slightly wrong in the bottom of the refrigerator. It brings back the wide swing of the Via Veneto, the gravel walks around the Palazzo Borghese, the seagods splendid in mosaic at Ostia, the upraised arm of Christ and his mother's half-shielded face in Michelangelo's Last Judgment--and the faces of my friends there, my cousin Elisabeth, her husband Michael, and their little boys...
Why should I recall Rome so vividly now?