sad day in Rome

After leaving the Palatine, we find ourselves a long, hot way from any Metro station. My fellow tourists Marion and Amil put their thumbs out and almost immediately we get a welcoming toot from a little green car. Our benefactor is a middle-aged woman with t-shirts stretched over the front seats as covers, and a photograph of a young Italian man stuck to the dashboard. She drives us all the way into the central station, asking us about our lives in her stilted but determined English. When Marion asks the woman if the man in the photo is her son, the woman replies that he is, and that he died of lung cancer in June last year. She says it kindly, but unapologetically; she's said it a thousand times before. I sit there dumbly and don't say anything about Alex. Rome is sunny and sad.