“But you can’t possibly know Rome by seeing it once,” he said, “as a tourist.” He was right. I could never know the Rome that Roberto knew. Just as the villa itself, even if unpleasant, was an experience of Italy to which I would have had no access as a student in Florence. It seemed to me that if you were poor and went to a foreign place, you met poor people who weren’t all that foreign to you, like the bikers and their girlfriends I’d hung around with at the squalid bar near the train station in Florence. And the opposite was probably true, too. For the rich, the world would be a series of elegantly appointed rooms, similar rooms and legible social customs, familiar categories of privilege the world over.