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My wife and I moved to Rome almost exactly five years ago, arriving on July 2, 2000, which happened to be the first day of an international Gay Pride festival in Rome. It was unfolding smack in the middle of the Great Jubilee called by Pope John Paul II to mark the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ, and the coincidence of a Gay Pride march taking place during the Holy Year, which struck many observers as a deliberate provocation, was generating no small amount of controversy.

The next day I attended the first session of the weeklong series of events leading up to the march, held at the Cicerone Hotel near the Vatican. During that morning's opening discussion, one of the organizers attempted to strike a conciliatory note, pledging to respect Rome as a "sacred city" for Roman Catholics. The speaker was stunned when an Italian woman immediately leaped to her feet and began screaming in response. I didn't speak Italian at that stage, and I'm sure some of the sfumature, meaning the subtleties, of the woman's tirade got lost in translation, but the substance was clear.

It was a "deep insult" to Italian sensibilities, she argued, to refer to Rome as "sacred." Such language, she said, hearkened back to the not-so-distant past when the popes ruled over Rome as secular monarchs, an aspect of the city's past that had been overcome with the 1870 unification of Italy with Rome as its capital. "Rome is not a sacred city," this woman thundered. "It is a democratic city, the capital of a secular republic. You can call the Vatican a sacred city, but not Rome!"

It was my first education in the complexities of Rome, and in the sometimes fierce, sometimes ironic Roman ambivalence toward the history, both sacred and profane, of the Eternal City.

The late...