Among the few priceless Treasures in my keeping--always at hand--is a tiny, half pocket-size Latin Dictionary, on every page of which I am always, on re-reading, discovering a glittering jewel of fact or fancy from the last Era of the World in which the Gods were kind to Man....

Yesterday, before stepping into the shower, I read in it, "Acqua Virgo, noted for its coolness and purity."  And I fell into a revery about my first excursion to Rome:  I'd deliberately arrived a couple of weeks early, before my summer-quarter Italian Language classes started in Perugia, 60 miles or so, as the crow flies and the train runs, north of Rome.  After scouting out Perugia and idyllic environs afoot for three or four days, I took the morning train to Rome, arriving at the Termini around Nine O'Clock, and set out a piede for the Vatican, past the Colosseum, Nero's Golden House, the Forum, the Monument to Victor Emmanuel (with stunningly beautiful carabinieri marching around it, and standing, breathtakingly, at attention), across the Tiber (looking sadly diminished, I couldn't help thinking) via the Ponte Sant'Angelo, up Mussolini Boulevard, and across Bernini's still fabulous piazza/colonnade, to the very front door of St. Peter's, feeling not a little like Frodo at the Gates of Mordor.  I went in, unchallenged, and strolled around in the gargantuan, gloomy Pompes funèbres of the interior, and took the guided tour--¿why not?--of the gold and jewels in the basement, then headed out.  Back down Mussolini Street, where I stopped at sidewalk cafe for a gelato and a whizz, and was molested (importuned, I should perhaps more moderately say) by an ancient Gypsy crone with hair as black as shoe polish and lips as red as a fire truck, who wanted money, and whom I stamped my foot at to shoo her away, causing her to curse me, and the nice middle class Romans sitting at near-by tables to purse their lips and shake their heads at me disapprovingly--a lot to absorb:  Italians do not necessarily or absolutely not approve of beggars, even Gypsy crones, begging from you in your sacrosanct space at a cafe table, and do not think it's always okay to be dismissively rude to them.  So noted.

So then, fairly early in the afternoon, back across the Tiber, heading in the general direction of the train station, I noticed in my Tourist Guide Map a large area of green about two thirds of the way back to the Termini, designated Giardini della Villa Borghese, so, as the day was growing quite hot, I directed thither my flagging spirits and dragging steps, hoping maybe to find some shade in which to repose myself--and/but what I found was very earthly Paradise. First, just inside the walls of the garden, within a shady grove of immemorial elms (Ombre mai furono), was a marble fountain with a copious single jet of water, which fell, splashing and tinkling, into a broad, deep basin--beside which I knelt and, into which I plunged my whole fevered head clear to the neck. Oh God was it cold, and pure, and fresh! and I cupped my hands and drank from it, and it was delicious. And that, I now know, was water from one of the branches of the Acqua Virgo, now called Vergine.  But then I knew not its name, and I walked further on till I came to a small lake or large pond, surrounded by raked gravel paths and nodding plain trees, on the far shore of which there was a little temple in the Ionic mode with a legend in Greek on the entablature above the columns which proclaimed "Asklepios Saviour."  And I found a bench in the shade of the trees, beside the path on this side of the pond, on which I stretched myself out and took a nap for twenty or thirty minutes, from which I arose completely refreshed, and not the least embarrassed or ashamed to have done so.

Thence I continued my walk to the train station, passing many splendid mostrae and baroque monuments too numerous to mention, and regrettably I had no time to stop and view them as they deserved.  And but/yet, just a few hundred meters from the Termini there were two little baroque churches side by side, each different, but both of such striking individual beauty that I just had to pause to look at them:  One, whose name I forget (Santa Susanna?), was the American Catholic church in Rome, famous for the number of actors which worship there--and may even be buried there.  It was the other, however, Santa Maria della Vittoria that I was drawn to, and into, mysteriously, as by a homing beacon: and there--with Vespers just started and me nearly causing a scandal with my uncontainable exclamations of astonishment, rapture, and delight--Bernini's Saint Theresa of Ávila in Extasy.  I was barely able to tear myself away in time to catch my first class (for the coffee and all the lovely people in their lovely first class clothes) train back to Perusia Venerabilis.