Sur la pierre blanche

A close‑knit circle of French expatriates—an embassy attaché, a literary scholar, a printer‑humanist, an engineer and an art‑loving gentleman—spends their Roman spring wandering the freshly unearthed Forum. On the evening of May 1st they slip through a little‑known northern gate, where the quiet commander Giacomo Boni greets them and leads them into a wooden house that overlooks the ancient market’s hollowed‑out pit. From there they step onto a landscape of broken steles, marble bases and weather‑worn columns, where the ruins of temples, arches and medieval houses mingle with the wild growth of grasses and poppies.

The friends pause to take in the layered tableau: the blue‑tinged columns of the Dioscuri temple, the ragged arches of Septimius Severus, and the faint outlines of the old basilica beneath a checkerboard of stone. Their conversation drifts from the practical—identifying newly exposed foundations of Domitian’s colossus—to the poetic, imagining the bustling stalls, the scents of onions and wine, and the everyday dramas that once filled the square. Through their eyes the listener is invited to wander the silent streets of an empire long gone, feeling the mix of scholarly curiosity and timeless wonder that the ancient stones still provoke.