Just arrived in Rome - I think.

It was through eyes heavy with fever that I first saw Rome. It was winter, a particularly hard winter, and the overnight train down from Geneva had been over-heated and uncomfortable. 1978 was altogether uncomfortable in Italy. Aldo Moro was only six months or so buried. The weak first-light that I stepped into hurt my eyes; the icy air attacked my throat as if with razor blades. But there was also a sense of home in the cold air that was made warm by the smells of coffee, bread and chocolate. Above everything there was fever. Sweats, shivers and nausea. Pigeons flying the length of the vaulted ceiling of Termini Station arriving and departing through missing panes of glass and ignoring the signs for wingless travellers like Lucia somebody and me - uscita, ingresso. Busy, busy all around, bouncy girls and valiant men, newspapers, taxis, invisible beggars and the ghost of Caesar. Rome at dawn. Or was it twilight? The two are often the same though so opposite. and easily confused. Sad, transitioning moments for the weary, fever-filled traveller far from home, facing a day or a night alone in a temperature-fuelled torpor with only aspirin and a bottle of thin water for company. Maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe it wasn’t even Rome. It could have been Patrice steaming into Prague from Dresden in 1934, drunk with fever, haunted by the reflection of the hollow face in the train window that he had to stare beyond to rest his hot eyes on the passing, hypnotising fields of Saxony. The golden sweetness of Prague’s winter twilight was like a balm on his heated cheeks. Church spires, Church bells. Everything glinting. Clouds catching the rays of the low-hung sun and turning apricot; apricot lace against a blue sky, thrown over the city like a net; hints of approaching evening and Patrice still with nowhere to stay for the night unlike the birds who wheel around the bell towers of churches and get ready to roost