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reports had occurred. The layout of the streets and piazzas of central Rome remained more or less the same today as four hundred years ago. Yet for all these details, pieced together like a mosaic to construct a narrative of his life, Caravaggio himself remained unknown, an enigma.
    7
    F RANCESCA BORROWED HER SISTER S ILVIA’S CAR FOR THE TRIP TO Recanati. Silvia had just bought the car used, a type known as an A 112. It was tiny, with a forty-three-horsepower engine that coughed and shuddered when Francesca shifted gears. The bumper was loose and there were rust spots on the fenders, which had once been blue but had faded to gray. Through a hole in the floorboards, Francesca could see the pavement passing beneath her feet.
    She left home on an April morning, a week after Easter. In Rome, the day was sparkling and the skies a deep blue, the temperature sweetly springlike. Francesca drove through crowded streets to the apartment where Laura lived with her mother and brother in the south of the city, near Via Marconi. Francesca was not, as she herself readily admitted, a skillful driver. She drove slowly, not out of caution but because of distraction: her mind was forever wandering to issues more interesting to her than driving. Motorists behind her would honk their horns and gesticulate angrily as they passed her. She always looked mystified—large eyes opened wide—at their ire.
    Laura put her overnight bag in the backseat and they set off, their spirits high, laughing and looking forward to an adventure. Within a few minutes, however, Laura began to get worried. It seemed that Francesca had no idea where she was going. She made one wrong turn, and then another. Laura began giving directions. When Francesca reached into the backseat to retrieve a book she wanted to show Laura, talking all the while, the car veered toward the sidewalk. Laura gasped. She could endure it no longer.
    “Listen, Francesca,” she said, “I think it would be better if I drove.”
    Francesca happily agreed.
    In Laura’s capable hands, they left Rome without incident, heading north on the Via Salaria, following the ancient Roman route toward the Adriatic. The trip to Recanati would take them over the Apennine Mountains, the spine of Italy, to the Adriatic Sea. In little more than an hour they reached the foothills. Ahead of them lay snowcapped peaks, shrouded in mist. A chilly breeze came up through the holes in the floorboards. The car’s tiny engine rattled, the gears made grinding sounds. As the grades grew steeper, traffic on the two-lane road began to back up behind them. Laura pulled over to the right, to the edge of the pavement, and they climbed in slow motion. Laura said they might have to get out and push the car to the top. Francesca looked worried, but Laura laughed.
    Cresting a long rise, they could see off to their right the great peak of Gran Sasso—the Big Stone, the highest of the Apennines. On the descent, the car gathered momentum. Laura discovered that the brakes were not much better than the engine, but the road was wide and the curves gentle, and Laura liked speed. In the far distance, they saw the dark blue horizontal line of the Adriatic, dividing sky and earth. At the coast, at the small town of Giulanova, they turned left and drove north along the shoreline to Ancona. The day was so clear and bright that they could see the faint outlines of the Dalmatian coast across the Adriatic.
    T HEY ARRIVED AT R ECANATI SHORTLY AFTER TWO IN THE AFTER noon. The town was eight miles inland from the coast, built a millennium ago on a hilltop. The little car struggled up the winding road, past groves of olives, in the shadow of an ancient defensive wall, crumbling in places, that still encircled the town. As they climbed, the countryside spread out before them like a storybook land—the Adriatic to the east, the Apennines to the west, and neighboring towns shimmering in the sunlight on their own hilltops, rising from the undulating