S.M.O.M

The Smallest Country in the world is half as large as a football field, approximately, and is located in downtown Rome two or three blocks from American Express, and next door to Cucci's, the haberdasher. Its flag is red and white, like Denmark's, and its name is rather immoderate, I think: the Sovereign and Military Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, which is abbreviated, at all but the most ceremonious of state occasions, to the Sovereign and Military Order of Malta, or the S.M.O.M. That the Sovereign and Military Order of Malta, or S.M.O.M., is truly sovereign is shown by its being recognized by Italy, the Vatican, San Marino, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, El Salvador, Argentina, Colombia, Panama, Chile, Haiti, Peru and Lebanon, and that it is truly military is shown by an air force bigger than that of half these places--120 planes, of which three, at the very least, are said to be in sufficient repair to permit them to leave the ground. The S.M.O.M. has an ambassador, or some sort of man, in each of the 19 countries that recognize it, and vice versa, and while it would be nonsense for me to suggest that these people have anything to do, I can suggest how they sometime might. Put the case that Signor Cucci, the haberdasher, is murdered today by a disgruntled client, who flees across the border into the S.M.O.M.; then, the only recourse for the Italian police and the Carabinieri is to extradite the man, something that would be done, of necessity, through the Italian Minister to the S.M.O.M., and the S.M.O.M.ian Minister to Italy.

What the Sovereign and Military Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta lacks in territory, it also lacks in population, being inhabited, at the last census, by two people, Brother Paternó and Baron Gabriel Apor. (A half-dozen years ago, there was another, His Eminent Highness Prince Ludovico Chigi Albani Della Rovere -- Prince Chigi, as he was abbreviated at all but the most ceremonious of occasions -- who was the Grand Master of the S.M.O.M., its sovereign, but who died in 1951 and hasn't been replaced.) Brother Paternó is the lieutenant grand master, and, as such, is kept so awfully busy with matters of state that I couldn't see him. while Baron Apor, whom I did see, and chatted with for quite a while, in fact, is the chancellor -- a small, animated, merry old gaffer who wears a black Homburg and carries a black umbrella, and is ever losing himself in old jokes and reminiscences, a characteristic one being that of the fellow who learned from his doctor that wine, women and song were killing him, and who replied, "Allora, smetto di contare" -- "OK, I'll give up singing." Between such jokes as these, the baron told me he doesn't pay taxes to Italy, being a citizen of the S.M.O.M., and that he brings in cigarettes, liquor and suchlike free of duty; and he offered me a free-of-duty Chesterfield. He travels, said the baron, on a passport of the S.M.O.M., which he graciously let me see: it was red and white and very natty, and the page that is signed by Mr. Dulles on my passport was signed by Baron Apor, himself, on his, and carried the words, "His Eminent Highness, Fra Ludovico Chigi Albani Della Rovere, Prince and Grand Master of the Sovereign and Military Order of Malta, requests all to whom it may concern to allow the bearer, Gabriel Apor, to pass freely and to afford him such assistance and protection of which he may stand in need." The next several pages were full of visas. Hereupon, the baron observed that nothing but the espial of bootleg gold will cause such a to-do at the international borders of Europe as the appearance there of himself or Brother Paternó with a S.M.O.M.ian passport, it being generally treated by the customs people as if it were radioactive. That the passport is allowed, eventually, at all of these borders, the baron said, is a proof positive of the sovereignty of the S.M.O.M. He added that the S.M.O.M. doesn't give any visas of its own, but can; that it doesn't mint any money of its own, but did; and that it doesn't print any stamps of its own, but will -- at some as yet undetermined time in the future, after the proper arrangements are made with the International Postal Union and an adequate place, if any, is found for a mailbox on S.M.O.M.ian soil.

Well, I think this is very unusual. How it managed to come about is a long story, and, with the reader's indulgence, I'd like to make it as long as possible, there being so very little I can say about the S.M.O.M. contemporarily. The fact is that the S.M.O.M. has been a country ever since 1048, but, unlike such other countries of those days as Slavonia, Catalonia, Lower Lorraine and the Caliphate of Cordova, it manages to be with us in the 20th Century by having been the only one which, whenever it was conquered, put lock, stock and population on a dozen or so ships and popped up somewhere else in Europe or Asia. Six hundred and twenty-six years of this peripateticism are noted, in chronological order, in the very name of the S.M.O.M. -- the only omissions being 100 years at Acre, 18 years on Cyprus, 42 years getting from one of these places to another and, of course, all of this century and most of the last in Rome. I suppose there's no reason why a nation cannot behave this way -- my dictionary, Webster's, says a nation should have "a more or less compact territory," and in the case of the S.M.O.M., it's less -- but, I think, it's altogether too trying on the rest of us, and sometimes the S.M.O.M. was gadding about so much that even its citizens didn't know where it was -- for instance, at the turn of the 19th Century, when, thinking the S.M.O.M was in Leningrad, of all places, they elected the czar as grand master. In spite of its aberrations, the S.M.O.M. was one of the greater countries of Europe much of the millennium; once, it owned a half-dozen forts along the Mediterranean, 140 estates in Palestine and 1900 in Europe; and in the protocol, it was always the first.

In those days, the citizens of the S.M.O.M. were known as the Hospitalers, for as a hospital the S.M.O.M. had begun -- in 1048 or thereabouts, in Jerusalem, to help the pilgrims. The hospital was named for St. John the Baptist, and was given a kind of extraterritoriality by the Moslems, making it a kind of Vatican City, and it stayed so after the Moslems left and the Crusaders came, in 1087. On that day, 10,000 people were killed in the Mosque of Omar alone, and their bodies floated in the blood; the Hospital of St. John had much to do; it was given money by many of the Crusaders it cared for, growing in power and population. Its first grand master was the Blessed Raymond du Puy, who made the S.M.O.M. a military, as well as a sovereign, state, and sent it into the Crusades, and who prescribed a religious rule for the S.M.O.M. that it still uses: "Firstly, I ordain that all the brethren engaging in the service of the poor and the defense of the Catholic faith, should keep the three things with the aid of God that they have promised to God: That is to say, chastity and obedience, which means whatever thing is commanded to them by their masters, and to live without property of their own: Because God will require these three things of them at the Last Judgment. And let them not claim more as their due than bread and water, and raiment, which things are promised to them. And their clothing should be humble, because Our Lord's poor, whose servants we confess ourselves to be, go naked and miserably clad. And it is a wrong thing for a servant that he should be proud, and his Lord should be humble." The grand masters who followed the Blessed Raymond du Puy realized, though, that a nation founded on chastity would be more or less transitory, so only a part of the citizenry took the vows. Those who did were Knights of Justice, and those who didn't were Knights of Honor and Devotion or Knights of Magistral Grace, and this differentiation is in the S.M.O.M. today. Baron Apor is a Knight of Honor and Devotion, and Brother Paternó is a Knight of Justice.

Jerusalem fell again to the Moslems in 1271 and, it's written, the nuns of the S.M.O.M. chose death to dishonor: they got a pair of scissors, cut their noses off, and cut everything else to ribbons, and so they were killed, and weren't raped, by the Moslems. The rest of the S.M.O.M. had already taken its kit and caboodle, as it would so often in the future, and had relocated to the north of Jerusalem, at Acre; then it was run out of there, too, and wasn't seen in the Holy Land for another 663 years, till 1954, when it opened the legation in Beirut, Lebanon. From Jerusalem to Acre; from Acre to Cyprus; from Cyprus to Rhodes, by which time even the grand master was so bewildered as to where, if anywhere, the S.M.O.M. would materialize next that he was 13 years in catching up. Presently, on Rhodes, the grand master was Deodato de Gozon. It is said of Deodato de Gozon in many histories of the S.M.O.M. -- almost all of which, incidentally, are called A Short History of the Order (or Knights) of Saint John of Jerusalem -- that he was nominated as the grand master by himself, was duly elected by himself and the others, and, nevertheless, was spoken of by the pope as a modest man -- and little wonder, for Deodato de Gozon had been the first knight in S.M.O.M.ian history to slay a dragon. According to the many Short Histories, the dragon, who had been eating women and children for several years, was slain by Deodato de Gozon and two of his English bulldogs, which, during the encounter, had held the dragon at bay, having been specially trained for the purpose on a wood, facsimile dragon; then, De Gozon and the bulldogs went back to the city in triumph, De Gozon becoming the grand master. Generally, I'm not one to put any stock in dragons, but, in fairness to Deodato de Gozon, his particular dragon is pretty well documented -- for one thing, by the tombstone of De Gozon himself, which says, in Latin, "Skill is the conqueror of force: Deodato de Gozon, knight, slew an enormous dragon." The stone was put up only 13 years after he died, by people who should have known, and one can only conclude that a terrible sort of animal was prowling about in the Middle Ages, but has mercifully gone extinct.

In 1444, the Sultan of Egypt laid siege to the S.M.O.M.; it was lifted, but many knights were dead, the fortifications were out (an earthquake and a tidal wave made them worse) and the S.M.O.M.ians were in a blue funk. Then, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, of the Ottoman Empire, laid seige again, and the people reacted in a manner that is quite unimaginable today -- by worrying of the enemy within, and all but forgetting the enemy without. A lady of Spain, a pilgrim, got to be something of a celebrity by going barefoot in Rhodes and incriminating people in high places, not naming any names, however; the first to be killed was a Turkish slave, and then a Jewish doctor, and the S.M.O.M. had progressed so far as to torture, try and behead the chancellor himself, D'Amaral, a predecessor of Baron Apor, when Suleiman the Magnificent opened fire, conquering the S.M.O.M. "There has been nothing in the world so well lost as Rhodes," said Charles V, of the Holy Roman Empire, incorrectly, and gave it to the island of Malta.

Charles V was to be given a falcon every year in return for Malta, and he appears, at first, to have had the better of the deal. Malta was naked when the S.M.O.M. got there; its castle had gone to seed; but the S.M.O.M., under the grand mastery of Jean Parisot de la (continued on page 71)S M O M(continued from page 56) Valette, worked for 36 years to fix it -- even the women, and even La Valette, were carrying stone to the parapets -- and the S.M.O.M. had its powder dry when Suleiman the Magnificent, who conquered it in Rhodes at the start of his reign, said he'd conquer it in Malta in the end. In 1565, he laid siege -- one of the great sieges of history, fought, for a third of a year, by 30,000 Turks and only eight or nine thousand S.M.O.M.ians. On land, crockery pots of wildfire were thrown, like hand grenades, from one to the other, and there were frogman fights at sea. It took a month for the Turks to get St. Elmo, an outpost, but 8000 of them had died in doing it, which got the Turkish general so angry that he cut a Maltese cross, with his scimitar, into every dead S.M.O.M.ian, and sent the bodies downstream to La Valette, which got La Valette, in turn, so angry that he beheaded his prisoners and fired a fusillade of human heads onto the Turks, "and from that day onward, no quarter was given on either side," in the words of a Short History. La Valette was told to surrender; he pointed to the trenches, saying, "There is the only ground I plan to surrender, and that as a grave for the Turkish army."

The catastrophe was at hand. The S.M.O.M. was reinforced, to a degree, by a Mesquita, the Governor of Nota-bile, who stormed the Turkish hospitals when nobody was about, and the Turks were reinforced by Hassan, the Begler Beg of Algeria, and, on Thursday, August 23, they assaulted all parts of the S.M.O.M. at once. The S.M.O.M. had been forewarned -- someone had shot an arrow into the fortress with the one word "Thursday" -- and almost every knight was out of the hospital, at the battlements. They held for more than a week; then, 8500 reinforcements came from Spain, and the Turks skedaddled in panic, many of them being killed, as they did so, by their very general, Mustapha Pasha. When Suleiman the Magnificent heard of this, he hit the ceiling, and resolved, at the age of 70, to lead an army himself; and he sent a letter to La Valette, in which he swore "by the god wch hath mayd heaven and yearth and by our xxvj Proffites and the foure Musaphi which fell downe out of heaven and by our chief proffit Mahomet" that nobody would be hurt if the S.M.O.M. surrendered. "But yf," added Suleiman, in his second sentence -- his first sentence had been 279 words long "but yf you will not yeald yor selves as wee have said wee will roote out the foundacion of your castell upsid downe, and make you slaves and to die an evell death according to our pleasure as wee have dann to manny others and of this be you right well assured." La Valette, after reading this, sent a few men to Constantinople, blew up the Turkish navy and that was the end of that.

Suleiman the Magnificent died in mortification that very year, and Jean Parisot de la Valette died, of sunstroke, two years later, and from then on the Ottoman Empire and the S.M.O.M. went downhill. The people of the S.M.O.M. gave in to luxury and vice, and Malta, won by bravery on August 23, 1565, was lost by cowardice on Seed 23, 6 -- to use the language of the French Directory, as it directed Napoleon to conquer Malta. Chiefly, the cowardice was that of the grand master, Ferdinand Joseph Anthony Herman Lewis von Hompesch, who, as Napoleon hove up with 14 sail-of-the-line, 30 frigates, and 300 cargo ships, did nothing, and the S.M.O.M. was conquered apace. ("How fortunate," said one of Napoleon's staff, "for a couple of dozen men could have held the city against us.") Taken to Napoleon, Von Hompesch asked for his chinaware and jewelry; he was turned down, and when he died, he was too poor to have a funeral. The other people of the S.M.O.M. took kit and caboodle once again and went, in a quandary, to Austria, England and Russia, and the ones in Russia, as I have already said, elected the czar as their 70th grand master. (That a czar should take the vows of chastity, and obedience and poverty, and still keep his crown, had not seemed at all irregular to the S.M.O.M. since the 13th Century, when it took King Andrew of Hungary in, and got, in gratitude, 700 silver marks a year.) After a while, the S.M.O.M. was given the half-acre of downtown Rome that is, still, its only territory, but part of the bargain was that only three men -- the grand master, the lieutenant grand master, and the chancellor -- could have the right of citizenship there. The other S.M.O.M.ians were to be citizens of the country they live in. Today, there are four or five thousand members of the Order of Malta who are citizens of Europe and the Americas, and, for them, it's very like the Order of Odd Fellows or the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, though 19 of them get to be real ambassadors. A few of the members in the United States are Francis Cardinal Spellman, Mr. Frank Leahy, Mr. Frank Folsom and Mr. Henry Ford II.

The two contemporary citizens of the S.M.O.M., Brother Paternó and Baron Apor, are well-behaved, exemplary men, and there isn't any need for the S.M.O.M. to have any laws or law court and, if we wish to learn of that aspect of the S.M.O.M., we must study it when it was more heavily populated, on the island of Malta. It was against the law, in those centuries, to throw rocks into a window or dirt onto a door, or to go to the ballet; slavery wasn't against the law (there was a big market in the capital city, Valetta) but cowardice was, and a General St. Clement, who ordered a withdrawal, was found guilty of it in the 16th Century. It was against the law to duel, but in Valetta there was a narrow street, the Strada Stretta -- the Narrow Street -- where the people of the S.M.O.M. used to get jostled, at times, and fly extemporaneously off the handle, and whenever they did, the law and the law courts would look the other way. Pretty soon, anybody who cared to duel did so on the Strada Stretta, it being closed to pedestrian traffic by the seconds. A common punishment for many of these crimes was to get no food; torture was legal, and General St. Clement, the coward, was strangled to death and thrown in a burlap bag into the Mediterranean. The S.M.O.M. gave sanctuary to the civil criminals of other countries --Caravaggio, the artist, a murderer, was one of them -- and the S.M.O.M.'s hospital gave sanctuary to the civil criminals of the S.M.O.M., although, in the course of time, conspirators, traitors, murderers, perjurers, poisoners, pillagers, sodomites, arsonites, assassins, debtors, highwaymen and thieves were barred from the hospital by one regulation after another.

Historically, the S.M.O.M.'s hospital was that of 1048 -- part of the caboodle taken from Jerusalem to Acre, Cyprus, Rhodes and Malta. The hospital seems to have gone downhill, though, as the S.M.O.M. did; it was visited in the 18th Century by John Howard, the philanthropist, who said it was "so dirty and offensive as to create the necessity of perfuming (the beds -- of which there were 745, by the way) and yet I observed that the physician in going his rounds was obliged to keep a handkerchief to his face," while the staff of the hospital were "the most dirty, ragged, unfeeling and inhuman persons I ever saw. I once saw eight or nine of them highly entertained by a delirious, dying patient." He also complained that the vermicelli was dirty and the bread was moldy, but, Baron Apor has assured me, this latter was on the menu for its penicillin content, the drug having been known, but not isolated, by the S.M.O.M.'s hospital in the 15th Century.

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All of which brings us to the Sovereign and Military Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta today -- i.e., Brother Paternó and Baron Apor. The latter of these has an apartment in the Italian quarter of Rome, but the former has made his abode on S.M.O.M.ian soil, in the Order of Malta Palace, 68 Via Condotti, a solemn, gray, four-floored building that takes up all the S.M.O.M.ian soil. The palace, a minute's walk from the bottom of the Spanish Steps, may readily be identified by the letters cvcci in front, in gold, which I took, at first, for some sort of Roman numeral but soon realized was a sign for Signor Cucci, the haberdasher. Here, at the front of the palace, Signor Cucci has rented a store, filling the windows of it with silken bathrobes and ties, and the several other stores in the palace have pearls, coral, gold tea services, and Buddhas of jade in their windows; none of the stores have extraterritoriality. Between the door to Cucci's and the door to Rapi's is the ponderous door to the S.M.O.M., indicated by a small silver plaque, Sovrano Internazionale Militare Ordine Di Malta, and by another, International Military Sovereign Order of Malta -- two further variations on the name of the country that, Baron Apor tells me, are erroneous, as is the variation on his own passport -- and beyond the door is a court, much smaller than a tennis court, but clearly large enough for the mailbox that Baron Apor is thinking of. The court is full of automobiles by day, some of them with S.M.O.M. plates, and is rather pretty at night: a Maltese cross, in red and white, is floodlit at the far end, and a gargoyle is spewing water into a pool of goldfish; and the whole thing can be appreciated till one A.M. from the Via Condotti, in Italy.

There is a concierge at the border of the S.M.O.M., but he graciously let me by, without any trouble, on the day I visited Baron Apor. The baron's office, as chancellor, is on the palace's third floor; it is well-appointed, but, unfortunately, it doesn't look into the courtyard but onto a typical scene of backyard Italy, a pasticcio of dirty wood and rickety balconies, one above the other and populated, for the most part, by white, restless pieces of laundry, like mountain sheep. For five or 10 minutes, I sat in the anteroom and looked at all this -- a cat lurked, a woman in black drew the laundry in -- until, presently, I was shown into the chambers of Baron Apor, who greeted me enthusiastically in English and Italian, told me the story about wine, women and song of which I have already apprised the reader, told me several facts about S.M.O.M. of which I have also apprised the reader, gave some hurried orders to a secretary, who was standing by with a pyramid of state papers in his hands, and took me, directly, on a furious tour of the S.M.O.M. -- first, the red and gold halls of state, where the Peruvian ambassador had presented his credentials a week earlier; then, a red and gold dining room with medieval tapestries; then, the green and gold room where the delegates of the four or five thousand members of the S.M.O.M. who don't have extraterritoriality meet, every now and then, to elect a grand master; and, last but not least, the S.M.O.M.'s hospital, in the back rooms of the palace. All of these rooms were tidy, shipshape, and hung with paintings and maps of Malta, and of the 76 grand masters -- Deodato de Gozon, the dragon killer, looking like Man Mountain Dean, and Prince Chigi, the one who died in 1951, looking like a perfect old man, bald-headed and white-goateed.

The hospital was excellent, I thought. Its waiting room was lit by ultraviolet, germicidal light, and I learned that the 160 or so patients who pass through it every day are given the newest of the miracle drugs -- isolated, at long last -- and the best of dietary food (a far cry from the 18th Century, when the rules of the S.M.O.M.'s hospital specified, for the patients, a diet of "the best soup, made of fowls, herbs, vermicelli, rice, etc., and every sort of meat ... such as chickens, pigeons, poultry, beef, veal, game, hashes, fricassees, stews, sausages, etc., in such quantities as are necessary; also fresh eggs, pomegranates, plums, and grapes, and every kind of freshment allowed to sick people; such as biscuits, apples, fruit, sugar, and all sorts of confectionery, each according to his wants." This is the same hospital that has been with us, interruptedly, for nine centuries, but, as I learned from Baron Apor, the S.M.O.M. also has a number of hospitals on foreign soil, some of them larger than the S.M.O.M., and some of them as far afield as London and Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where at first the red and white S.M.O.M.ian flags were taken for those of Denmark by the Schleswig-Holsteiner, who decided the Danes weren't up to any good.

Before I left, I learned from Baron Apor that two other things the S.M.O.M. does, in this 20th Century, are to fly pilgrims from Italy, Ireland and Sardinia to Lourdes, and to fly missionaries out of Africa for what, in the United States Army, is called an R&R -- a Rest & Recreation leave. For these purposes, the S.M.O.M. uses its air force, such as it is, which is kept on Italian soil, is flown by Italians, and, as a matter of fact, was gotten gratis from Italy at the end of World War II. The S.M.O.M., itself, was strictly neutral in that war, as in every war since the Napoleonic ones, and its ambulances went north and south of battleline, and, as a consequence, the S.M.O.M. now considers itself on friendly terms with every country on earth -- except one, a country 200 times as large and scarcely a mile away, Vatican City. The cause of the falling-out of these two Roman Catholic neighbors is that root of all evil, money: the Vatican has wanted the S.M.O.M.'s, or, at least, the right to audit it, ever since the S.M.O.M. went into the red a half-dozen years ago, when all of its navy -- a rented navy -- disappeared on the Atlantic Ocean with 10,000 bushels of wheat. It turned out that a Count Thun, a federal employee of the S.M.O.M., was using the S.M.O.M.'s money to play the wheat market, and it also turned out that someone else at the S.M.O.M. was playing the stock market, and that someone else was smuggling radios from the United States to Italy, via the S.M.O.M., in boxes that were marked "penicillin." Prince Chigi, the grand master, died of a broken heart when he heard of this, and the Vatican investigated; now the S.M.O.M., though, is in the black, and has written a secret 100-page paper telling the Vatican to make itself scarce. What will come of this is hard to say, for relations between the S.M.O.M. and the Vatican have been off-again, on-again since the 13th Century, when Pope Gregory IX threatened to excommunicate it. (Pope Gregory thought it was in cahoots with the Order of Assassins, a Moslem one, and the S.M.O.M. didn't help any by going to war, soon afterwards, with the Order of the Temple, a Catholic one.)

Relations between the S.M.O.M. and the nonsovereign, nonmilitary Order of the Holy Sepulchre also are none too good; they have been off-again, on-again since the 11th Century, when, according to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the S.M.O.M. made too much noise. Nowadays, the schism is over real estate, some profitable land at Sorrento, which both the S.M.O.M. and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre lay claim to. The Grand Commander of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and enemy of the Order of Malta is Nicola Cardinal Canali, who was, nevertheless, named by the Vatican to investigate the Order of Malta, and who, moreover, is in the Order of Malta -- a pretty kettle of fish, I think, and one that I wouldn't dare to elucidate any further.

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I suspect, by now, that many of my readers, who have visited Italy and the Vatican City, are cursing themselves for having been a block or two away and, yet, having missed the chance of doing a third country, the S.M.O.M. They will be comforted to know, accordingly, that if they saw everything in Rome that is expected of them as tourists, they have done the S.M.O.M. -- unwittingly. They will recollect being taken, as part of their itinerary, to a shady hill by the Tiber, and being directed by the American Express man to peek through a keyhole in a large, wooden door; and what they saw was a lovely thing, a long, green avenue of trees, and the dome of St. Peter's a mile beyond. The dome of St. Peter's is part of Vatican City, of course, and the keyhole is part of Italy -- indeed, a national monument -- but the door in which the keyhole is situated, and the avenue of trees, are part of the S.M.O.M.: it's the summer villa of the grand master, and, like the summer villa of the Pope, at Castelgandolfo, it's extraterritorial.

One doesn't know how the Pope would feel about such a practice, but, I'm pleased to report, the grand masters of the S.M.O.M. have never taken exception to the thousands of tourists who visit their summer villa and peek into the keyhole. The door itself is not opened for the tourists, though; it is opened only for the grand master, when there is a grand master, and for those people, like me, who are given what amounts to a visa by Baron Apor, and it is opened on these occasions by Signor Cesare Giacchetti, a kindly old Italian who has opened the door, closed the door, cleaned out the fluff in the national monument, pruned the avenue of trees and some persimmon trees, out of sight, and dusted the villa of the grand master since the end of World War I. Signor Giacchetti performed the first two of these functions for me, and said he uses a penknife to perform the third, the fluff being frequently put into the national monument by a couple of young imps in the neighborhood; he also observed that until quite recently, the scene to be contemplated at the end of the avenue of trees wasn't St. Peter's Cathedral but an Italian smokestack: there was an outcry in the Italian press, and the indignity was taken down. Signor Giacchetti and I had been chatting of these matters, in the garden of the grand master's villa, for barely a minute, when one of those tinted, air-conditioned buses arrived, and two or three dozen tourists got out, to peer into the keyhole; and Signor Giacchetti and I peeked back.

The tourists had the better peek. It encompassed not only Signor Giacchetti, me, and a national monument or two, but no fewer than three countries: Italy, the S.M.O.M., and Vatican City. It is, I think, the most extraordinary panorama of its sort to be seen from anywhere on the Continent but the summit of Mt. Blanc, and I heartily commend it to the vacationist in Rome.