IL CONVIVIO

For days the phrases of musical compositions in the making ever more frequently arriving to punctuate my battling with paragraphs, through the thick walls and open windows of this 19th-century tavern on the highest hill of Rome: the same foundations of montorio having turned from the villa of Monsignor Innocenza Malvasio who had Galileo demonstrate the workings of his telescope, destroyed by the French during the wars of unification, to those of a tavern: "Roman decadence in a nutshell," remark my Roman friends. Hilarious—but no longer.