Evelyn remembered the journey from the rail station to the Pensione Simi, down dark streets teeming with life and smells and across trecento squares where she saw statues come to life and where the bells called the medieval dead to rise. A conspiracy of beauty everywhere. The city threw aside its cloak and introduced itself to her, and she met it with eyes wide and heart thumping and openmouthed. She stumbled clumsily from the cab into the vestibule of the hotel. She couldn’t speak. It wasn’t being struck dumb by beauty per se, but the acknowledgment that if such beauty existed, then so did
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