ABSTRACT
Llive in a small country house I built in 1948 on the Via Cassia, or anglice the Cassian Way, the ancient Roman con sular road which led to Siena and Florence. It still does, except that trucks and cars fortunately now travel on the new autostrada, and so the venerable highway on which all northern travellers reached the Eternal City for more than two thousand years is used mostly by local traffic. My neighbourhood is known as La Tomba diNerone, Nero's Tomb, which, of course, is an erroneous popular appellation, as Nero was notoriously buried in Piaza del Popólo on the spot where the church of Santa Maria del Popólo was later built to exorcise his ghost. The sarcophagus not far from my house really belongs to an obscure and assuredly virtuous Roman bourgeois couple, a certain Publius Vibius Maximus and his wife. La Tomba is by no means a suburban location. It is only seven or eight miles from the heart of Rome, the Campidoglio, an insignificant distance in any of the other great cities of the world.
