A gritty grain of truth lay at the heart of most legends, she had told me, and the slow accretion of fiction hardened in layers around it.

There are personalities so powerful that they leave their stamp on any place they inhabit. Their presence is always there, like a spoor, whether or not they themselves are.

Myth is someone else's religion.

If a place is in your blood, you leave it at your peril. You will never be happy anywhere else.

A gritty grain of truth lay at the heart of most legends, she had told me, and the slow accretion of fiction hardened in layers around it.

Why do early risers always take that self-righteous tone?

Night doesn't fall in Rome; it rises from the city's heart, from the gloomy little alleys and courtyards where the sun never gets much more than a brief look-in, and then, like the mist from the Tiber, it creeps over the rooftops and spreads up into the hills.