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making. This is where true superiority lies.”
    Additionally, his father would warn him: “One must preserve, at every cost, one’s liberty; keep it whole, to the point of exhilaration. The rule of a man of intellect is this:—
Habere, non haberi
.” 3
    He also used to say: “Regret is the fruitless pasture of an idle mind. One must avoid regret above all things, always keeping the mind occupied with new sensations and new imaginings.”
    But these
voluntary
maxims, which by their ambiguity could also be interpreted as high moral criteria, fell upon an
involuntary
nature, namely, in a man whose willpower was extremely weak.
    Another paternal seed had perfidiously borne fruit in Andrea’s soul: the seed of sophistry. “The sophism,” that incautious educator would say, “is at the base of every human pleasure and pain. To intensify and multiply sophisms is therefore equal to intensifying and multiplying one’s pleasure or pain. Perhaps the knowledge of life is to be found in the obscuring of truth. The word is a profound thing, in which for the man of intellect inexhaustible richness is hidden. The Greeks, craftsmen of the word, are in fact the most exquisite hedonists of all antiquity. The sophists flourished in great number in the century of Pericles, in the golden age.”
    Such a seed had found fertile ground in the morbid genius of the young man. Little by little, in Andrea falsehood had become not so much toward others as toward himself a habit so inherent to his conscience that he had reached a point where he could never be completely sincere, and could no longer regain his self-control.
    After the premature death of his father, he found himself alone at the age of twenty-one, commanding a considerable fortune, distanced from his mother, under the sway of his passions and his tastes. He remained in England for fifteen months. His mother remarried to an old lover of hers. And he came to Rome, for which he had a predilection.
    Rome was his great love: not the Rome of the Caesars but that of the popes; not the Rome of the arches, of the thermal baths, of the forums, but the Rome of the villas, of the fountains, of the churches. He would have given the entire Colosseum for Villa Medici, Campo Vaccino for Piazza di Spagna, the Arch of Titus for the Fontanella delle Tartarughe. The princely magnificence of the Colonnas, of the Dorias, of the Barberinis attracted him vastly more than the ruins of imperial grandeur. And his great dream was to possess a palace adorned by Michelangelo and embellished by the Caraccis, like Palazzo Farnese; a gallery full of paintings by Raphael, Titian, Domenichino, like the Galleria Borghese; a villa like that of Alessandro Albani where the deep box hedges, the red Oriental granite, the white Luni marble, the Grecian statues, the Renaissance paintings, the memories themselves of the place would cast a spell around one of his haughty lovers. At the home of his cousin the Marchioness of Ateleta, in an album of society confessions, alongside the question “What would you like to be?” he had written “Roman prince.”
    When he arrived in Rome toward the end of September 1884, he established his abode in the Palazzo Zuccari at Trinità de’ Monti, above that delightful Catholic tepidarium where the shadow of the obelisk of Pius VI marks the passage of Time. He spent the whole month of October absorbed in the decoration of his home; then, when the rooms were adorned and ready, he went through a few days of invincible sadness in his new house. It was an Indian summer, a springtime of the dead, 4 grave and sweet, in which Rome reclined, entirely golden like a city of the Far East, under an almost milky sky, as diaphanous as the heavens mirrored in the southern seas.
    That languor of air and light where all things appear almost to lose their reality and become immaterial gave the young man an infinite exhaustion, an inexpressible sense