Fifty years ago, in 1959, three important events occurred in my life: I graduated from college where I had spent four years reading literature; I was introduced to the world of foreign travel; and I began law school.
In Rome in the summer of that year, my college roommate and I stayed at a pensione near the Spanish Steps by the house where John Keats died. At the time I remember reading one of his marvelous letters, in which he looked forward to a walking tour in the north of England and Scotland which will “make a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue—that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest expense. I will clamber through the Clouds and exist.”
