“One lifetime is not enough for Rome,” the famous saying goes, and anyone who’s ever been there knows these words to be true. In City of the Soul , William Murray begins to show us why. Growing up in Rome and spending much of his life in the city, William Murray is an expert guide as he takes us on an intimate walking tour of some of Rome’s most glorious achievements, illuminating the history and the mythology that define the city. Murray leads us through the centro, the city’s historic downtown center. He writes about the Villa Borghese, the Piazza di Spagna, and the Trevi Fountain and describes such singular attractions as the Capuchin Church of Santa Maria della Concezione, whose macabre crypt has impressed visitors from Mark Twain to the Marquis de Sade. As he walks, he reveals stories that only a longtime resident would know, capturing the sights, sounds, and flavors that make Rome a combination of the deep past and the ever-sensual present. The New Yorker staff writer tours the town where he was raised. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. William Murray is the author of more than twenty books, including Italy: The Fatal Gift and The Last Italian . A staff writer for The New Yorker for more than thirty years, he wrote many of the “Letters from Italy” and has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Playboy, and Esquire. He lives in Del Mar, California. One The entrance into the heart of Rome from the north is through a monumental medieval gate in the ancient Aurelian Wall that suddenly thrusts the visitor into the spacious magnificence of the Piazza del Popolo, one of the city's most beautiful squares. For about a year I walked under this portico every morning on my way to whatever the day would bring. The year was 1949 and I lived then in a small two-room apartment on the Via Flaminia, a couple of blocks away. It was the period of my life when I was studying singing, still hoping for a career in opera as a lyric tenor, while supporting myself as a part-time journalist, mainly as a stringer for the Rome bureau of Time-Life. I always tried to arrive in the piazza early enough to have a cappuccino at the Café Rosati, on the southwestern side of the square, from where I could sit out in the open, read a morning newspaper, and occasionally look out over the great sweep of space, punctuated at its center by the Egyptian obelisk of Ramses III, to the heights of the Pincio gardens across the way. Rome is nothing if not a feast for the eyes. I lived in the city then as an adopted Roman and thought that I would never leave it. I had spent most of the first eight years of my life in Rome. My mother, Natalia Danesi Murray, was a native Roman, the oldest of three daughters born to an editor and printer named Giulio Danesi and his wife, Ester Danesi Traversari. Giulio died suddenly of septicemia in 1915, leaving Ester nearly penniless. The young widow went to work as a journalist to support herself and her children, became the first Italian female war correspondent by visiting the Austrian front in 1918, and went on to found and edit two leading women's magazines, until forced to flee to the United States in 1936 by her opposition to the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. My mother had married an American talent agent, after whom I was named, but had soon after separated from him. She was in Italy with me when he went broke in the stockmarket crash of 1929 and she went to work in the theater as an actress and singer to support us. When she brought me back to America in the fall of 1934, I spoke only Italian and French. I soon learned English, however, and became a totally American kid, refusing even to speak Italian at home with my mother and grandmother. My love of music brought me back to Italy in 1947, after the Second World War, when I was twenty-one. I could study there far more cheaply than in the States, and most of the great opera singers I admired were Italian. Within a year of my arrival I had again become fluent in the language and comfortably at home among the ancient stones of the city's centro storico, its historic heart. I had also discovered that I had a family connection to the Piazza del Popolo. The square was named after the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, first erected as a small chapel in 1099 diagonally across from where I sat every morning nursing my cappuccino. The site was chosen to liberate the populace from the frightening nocturnal apparitions of the hated Emperor Nero's ghost, whose tomb was reportedly located directly under where the main altar now stands. At the time the chapel was built, the piazza didn't exist; it was merely an open space of vineyards and vegetable plots. In 1227, Pope Gregory IX built the original church. It was torn down and replaced by the present one in 1472, under the supervision of Pope Sixtus V, who was also mostly responsible for the shape the piazza eventually assumed. He placed the obelisk, originally imported