Aunt Flora, who had moved to Rome after being expelled from Alexandria two years earlier, lived with relatives who had long resided in Rome. Theirs was a large house, where she and her niece and nephew lived on a separate floor. Flora’s was the first telephone call we ever received in Rome, and hearing her voice after two years was an instant source of comfort. She said we should meet on Largo di Villa Peretti. “Impossible to miss,” she said, “it’s the very last stop on any bus line going from Via Appia Nuova to Stazione Termini.” There was a tiny caffè where she said she’d wait for us. But how were we to take a bus? my mother asked. “Very simple: you step in the back of the bus, you pay fifty lire each.” Did we have money? Yes, we had money. Did we know where Via Appia Nuova was? Yes, we did. “Simple, then,” added Aunt Flora. Cast into the role of perpetual interpreter for my mother, I kept hoping I hadn’t misunderstood my aunt’s instructions. But my mother was not nervous at all. We had breakfast—Rice Krispies, using the few pieces of stainlesssteel cutlery we found in one of the drawers. No one, it seemed, had used these spoons in ages. But we rushed through breakfast, washed, put on clean clothes, and were about to leave the apartment when my mother remembered to take our garbage pail and leave it outside our main door as Uncle Claude had reminded us to do. Outside our door I found a pair of bottles of mineral water that had been delivered. We’d been warned about bad tap water. Grazia had told me that we’d have to return the bottles every few days. Or we could cancel delivery of bottles and buy our own water as needed, the cheaper option. I’d forgotten to tell her to cancel the deliveries.

Downstairs, we greeted her as she sat on a stool by the main entrance clipping green bean pods and placing the pods in a neat row on a newspaper spread open on an adjacent bench. What awaited her after the beans was the rice she was going to sort, one grain at a time, to avoid cooking either hardened clay or grit or brittle chips of stone, she said. She asked if we’d slept well. I replied that we had, using a tone so deferential as to suggest that she herself might have had something to do with the general silence we’d been experiencing every night since our arrival. Had the noise really not upset us? I hadn’t heard any noise, I lied. “Did your mother hear anything?” No, I said, my mother was deaf. Yes, the dottore had told her as much. “But doesn’t she hear even a tiny bit?” I shook my head. As so frequently happened, my mother had intuited exactly what we were discussing, and, pointing hastily to both her ears with an index finger, shook that same finger to mean Ears don’t work. Grazia uttered a few words of sympathy and commiseration in pure Roman and, in an attempt to establish some kind of parity between my mother’s ailment and hers, with her paring knife in one hand and her cigarette in the other, she pointed to her swollen ankles and to her bean pods with an expression that seemed to say, Look what I’ve been reduced to myself. She would remain a loyal friend to my mother, as would Grazia’s mother and both her brothers. My mother’s smile and her humility would have won over a famished beast ready to pounce on the first human it ran into.

What I didn’t tell Grazia was that no one had warned us about the marketplace set up on Via Enea every weekday at dawn. By five in the morning, the owners of a long line of market stalls came in small loud trucks or in equally loud three-wheeled mini truck-scooters bearing all manner of wares: shoes, shirts, kitchen utensils, vegetables, fruits, cheeses, pizzas, breads, and countless kinds of meat and fish. Some of these merchants brought wooden pallets while others brought long planks that needed to be nailed to hold up their stalls and keep awnings in place. By day’s end, though, everything had to be taken down and brought back to their depot. The racket of engines, people yelling, and the relentless nailing of the planks would become my alarm clock until, eventually, as happens with the blare of fire engines in large cities, one simply slept through them. In the evening, as I soon found out, not a sprig of parsley or a wedge of garlic or a rotten tomato was left on the street. This happened every day of the week except on Sundays and holidays.

I told Grazia that we were headed to meet my aunt near Termini. It was to be our first trip away from Via Clelia and I wanted to know where to find the nearest bus stop. “Di fronte al Diana,” in front of the Diana, she replied. “It’s a cinema,” she said. So Uncle Claude hadn’t lied. I was so grateful to Grazia that, by way of showing some enthusiasm for her city, I told her I couldn’t wait to see the Colosseum and the Vatican. “They say they’re beautiful,” she said. Then she confessed. She had never seen either. “And I was born here,” she added upon seeing the stunned look on my face.

It was as if someone raised in Alexandria claimed never to have seen the sea, or a Parisian not to know the Eiffel Tower. Foreigners often know a city far better than its denizens, the way they know an acquired language better than its native speakers; they just speak with an accent, which will always mark them as outsiders regardless of their efforts to brush off those dead-giveaway inflections that disclose the beat of their hearts.

I was under the impression that my knowledge of Italian was passable but I didn’t want to be spotted immediately as a foreigner, though I was no less Italian than any Roman. My ancestors, Jews displaced from Spain in the early sixteenth century, had indeed resided in Italy for centuries, and my home was Livorno, though that was a bit of a stretch, since some of them, after moving from Italy to Turkey, hadn’t lived there for at least two centuries. When my father had given up his Turkish nationality in Egypt, the easiest and most natural option was to reacquire our lapsed Italian nationality, but the only city that we could claim as our home was Livorno, not just because many Jews had settled there when the Medici opened the city to them following their expulsion from Spain, but for the simple reason that the records office in Livorno had burned down and anyone could allege having roots there. To prepare for what seemed our fated move to Italy, my father had hired an Italian tutor, an elegant and kindly gentleman who had escaped Mussolini’s regime and settled in Egypt partly because it was a British colony and he had always liked Britain and had learned English with great zeal, though he spoke it with a very thick Italian accent. Signor Dall’Abaco was originally from Siena, which he claimed was the one city where perfect Italian was spoken.

Grazia’s Roman dialect, however, especially when spoken very quickly, was unfathomable. Hers was a spare, almost infantile Italian though cluttered with idioms, expressions, and figures of speech totally beyond my comprehension. I learned to nod, something I had picked up from my mother, who did so just when a nod was called for and never before. She had an instinct for where to use her nods for punctuation, all based on nothing more than mere guesswork and facial observation. As a child I was not aware of her gift for penetrating the minds and motives of others, but as I grew I was always surprised at how right she was when she said that so-and-so was to be trusted, but never such-and-such. Thus, within a few months of the start of our life in Rome, she told some of the people in our immediate neighborhood that she was good at giving injections, which she’d learned as a nurse during the Second World War. When our sixteen-year-old neighbor across the street, Amina, kept coming for injections because, her parents said, she was far too skinny and needed to put on more weight and had seen a doctor who recommended injections to that effect, my mother’s guess was not entirely wrong: “She is coming for my injections, but she is here for you, and if she sits with me at the kitchen table and watches me cook or asks me to wash her hair in the sink, it’s all for you.” I was not attracted to Amina, so the more I avoided her in our apartment, the more she found a reason to knock at our door and sit with my mother in the kitchen, eventually teaching my mother how to cook typically Roman dishes. Her parents knew a great deal about food, as they owned one of the stalls in the marketplace on Via Enea, a block away.

After waiting for what seemed like an hour for the bus that was to take us to meet Aunt Flora, we finally saw one approach in the distance. We paid for the tickets as if we knew what we were doing, and my mother pocketed them with the self-assurance of someone who’d been living in Rome her whole life. My brother spotted an empty seat, looked at my mother, read her lips, and right away walked over and sat down. After all, we came from a place where you grabbed an empty seat as soon as you saw one.

But my brother was mistaken. About two stops later an older woman came on board and asked him to give up his seat, as she was stanca morta, dead tired. He relinquished his seat, not sure whether he...