The Roman Forum is—along with the Parthenon and the Egyptian pyramids—one of the mandatory sites for reflection on the passing of great powers, the impotence of architectural grandeur, and, these days, on the windfall profiteering of cold soda in places that attract mass tourism. Having come to spend a few days in Rome—for a book festival, the modern author’s equivalent of those pilgrimages that set ancient authors travelling from one marvel to the next—I found myself wandering through the nicely cleaned-up archeological site and brooding. It remains one of the most powerfully empathetic activities a New Yorker can engage in. It’s so exactly like walking through the future ruins of the corner of Fiftieth and Fifth: instead of the Basilica of Maxentius, the Temple of Saturn, and the three imposing columns that are all that remains of the Temple of Jupiter, there would be, facing what the guidebooks explain was once called “uptown,” the ruins of Rockefeller Center on your left, all office buildings and public plazas and sculptural reliefs as grand as can be; then, on your right, what remains of Saint Patrick’s, a religious-civic cathedral as big as imaginable; and then a few evocative fragments of Saks, once a department store as commodious as any. And not far away, a stadium in which tens of thousands of people would watch gladiators put their lives at risk in order to win the indulgence of a local oligarch. (Well, that could never happen now.) One member of my expedition, as our great-grandfathers would have written, does insist that Rome is best understood not as old New York but as an ancient Los Angeles—what with its relative proximity to the ocean, its ascent up into the hills, the long view down on its spread-out evening glitter. Either way, it’s weirdly familiar.

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