Rome was very different from what Anso was used to. Florence was a large enough city with all of the chaos and madness that went along with that but Rome was an entirely different animal. The population rattled around in an enormous space, The Vatican being the center of that activity. Anso’s guide now led him through an overgrown urban wilderness.

Fields once farmed by legions of peasants to feed the armies of the Empire now lay fallow, squatted on by bands of Spanish “adventurers.â€? Ruins dating from the time of the ancients that had stood crumbling and abandoned were now being re-tasked by prostitutes and other organized criminals.

Things like crime and unseemliness were of course to be found in Florence as well, the same things Anso found here in Rome were what set the monk Savonarola on his crusade against the Medici, but there was a sense of life there and of moderation. Here, Anso felt as if he was walking through a rotted corpse that had been colonized by a particularly active and colorful fungus.