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will not waste words on the details of our transit, except to say that we spent a week on the backs of those mules—and the snow on the mountain passes was so thick that where it had been piled beside the road, it reached above our heads.
    Imola lies at the very foot of the Apennines, upon that great carpet of rust-colored soil, known as the pianura , that stretches to the Adriatic Sea, one of those cities the Romans strung along the Via Emilia like beads on the reed of an abacus. You could fit all of Imola into Rome’s Campo Marzio, but the city itself is not a great pasture like so much of Rome. There is a thick stone wall all around it, with everything packed tightly inside, and there are fewer tottering old brick towers than we have in Rome and just as many modern palazzi. With all the soldiersthere and the army of opportunists that has followed them, you could count just as many souls in Imola on the day I arrived as you could count in Rome on the day I left.
    We entered the city through the gate that faces the Apennines, thus called the Mountain Gate, passing through a wall thick enough to build a house within. Just inside we found a crowd flailing about like crabs in a sieve: candle-shop streetwalkers painted so heavily their faces looked like Carnival masks; porters with bundles balanced on their heads and peasants with baskets of eggs or sausages atop theirs; merchants in fur-trimmed capes, monks in coarse brown cowls, and cardsharps wearing velvet jackets short enough to display codpieces that might have been stuffed with cabbages. Order was kept by the local militia, rosy-faced mountain boys in jackets and puffy breeches, all striped with Borgia vermilion and yellow.
    The pope had secured our lodgings at the Palazzo Machirelli. This was a new building, only a few streets up from the Rocca, the immense stone fortress that anchors the southwest corner of the city. My two small rooms were upstairs, barren save for a big walnut chair and a bed with feather-stuffed covers. Camilla threw open the shutters, allowing us to look out over a lovely courtyard of the most modern all’antica design, with slender columns and graceful arches.
    We spent the next few days unpacking our chests, determining what to buy, and with great effort securing charcoal, wine, bread, and cheese, as everything is scarce here. With the days too cold to open the shutters more than a crack, we saw little of our neighbors. Even so, Camilla and I made a game of spying on them, just as we had when our windows overlooked the Via dei Banchi, in those years before Juan was murdered. Whenever we heard steps crunching in the frozen sand, we peeked out and gossiped about men we did not know.
    “Merchant. Venetian,” Camilla said of a graying gentleman wearing a sable cap, with sable lapels on his cioppa .
    “You are correct about the attire,” I said, “but a Venetian of his years would dye his hair, and this man has a little stoop from sitting too much—a scholar’s stoop. Ambassador. Ferrara or Mantua.”
    “Poor fellow,” Camilla said sadly of a much younger man, whoretrieved a mule from the stables and proceeded to pace it dutifully around the courtyard, wearing only thin hose and a short jacket so threadbare that a louse would have slid off.
    “Look at his hair,” I said with less sympathy, “tossed helter-skelter atop his head like a spring salad. Messer Salad-head. But he is not a manservant. Do you see the ink on his fingers? An ambassador’s clerk. And mule keeper. Florentine. They are a republic now. And republics don’t pay to dress their clerks.”
    Having finished his circuits, the mule keeper began to feed the beast hay out of his hand, as if it were his child. He was engaged in this communion when a boy of perhaps twelve, attired in a peasant’s horsehair cape, with bare legs and shoes that might have been carved from gourds, entered through the stables and went at once to him. The two spoke briefly, whereupon the mule keeper