When I return to Rome, I feel a foolish mixture of excitement and pride, as though the city belongs to me. Or rather, as though I belong to it. Every visit is a kind of homecoming. Like the fields and pastures of my father’s farm, its territory makes a claim on me. It reminds me that I belong to a family. If one of the Romans who speeds past me on the cobblestones, or grimaces as I order coffee, were to hear me say this, he would laugh in my face. But it is not my fault that he, and not I, was born in a magical city, whose very ground is (in the words of Pius V) inzuppata col sangue dei martiri, soaked with the blood of the martyrs like a piece of bread dipped in soup.