Yesterday, we visited the Keats-Shelley museum at the foot of the Spanish Steps. The museum is housed in the apartment Keats was staying when he died, a room with a really terrific view in which to breathe one’s last tubercular breaths. Shelley really had no connection to the place at all, but like most of the Romantics he spent a lot of time in Italy, and like Keats, he also died there, far too young.

I was reminded of the fascination that Italy held for the English, and I found myself wishing I had brought one of the many English or American novels set in this country, instead of David Copperfield, which doesn’t really set the same mood. The last time I was here, I brought The Marble Faun and really enjoyed it. Wasn’t The Buccaneers set in Rome? Or what about Daisy Miller — doesn’t she catch her death in the Colosseum? I’m positive that half of James’s oeuvre takes place in Italy, because his heroines, like Keats, were forever visiting for their health. There’s always A Room with a View, but I think I need to save that until I get to Florence.

After a brief visit, we had high tea at the Babington English Tea Rooms, which flank the Spanish Steps on the other side. Babington’s has been around since 1893, because as much as the English love Italy, they also love the comforts of home. It was easy to imagine homesick twentieth-century Brits flocking to the place like modern American college students to MacDonald’s.