For Here Be Barbarians
Her collapsing body was now that of a marionette deprived of her nimble puppeteer. A young life ending, bloodily, in front of me and the surging throng. Taken by the stabbing tip of an umbrella, on a subway platform, on a dry Italian day. On her face no indication of that irony. Only…what? Resignation? Acceptance? For this was Rome and here be barbarians.
In Via Rasella, near the Trevi Fountain, I counted, as the rain fell, the bullet and bomb scars that recall the 23rd of March, 1944. Italian partisans, tiring of the German Occupation and fascist intransigence, ended the lives of thirty-three Nazi security personnel before escaping, unharmed, into the smoke and mayhem.