Woodrow Wilson's 1919 visit to Rome is presented both as a formal diplomatic spectacle and as a crisis of interpretation. The ceremonies place the president among the monuments of ancient power, while Richard Ellsworth Savage reads that setting against the suffering and hopes produced by the war. The visit's decisive significance lies in this division: Wilson speaks of humanity and the meaning of history, but Savage fears that the United States is becoming a new Rome, capable of turning idealistic language into imperial rule.

Arrival and ceremonial preparation

In the days before Wilson arrived, Richard Ellsworth Savage had little to do but walk around Rome, listen to bands practicing The Star-Spangled Banner, and watch flags and stands being erected. The president was expected on January 3, and several couriers were held at his disposal. These preparations make the visit visible first as an approaching public occasion: music, decorations, and official arrangements gather around a leader who has not yet appeared.

The New Year's Day outing with Ed Schuyler, G. H. Barrow, and Anne Elizabeth Trent offers a more private counterpoint. The group hires a car to visit Hadrian's Villa and then goes to Tivoli for lunch. Rain has made the roads muddy; the winter Campagna reminds Anne Elizabeth Trent of home. Over fritto misto and Frascati wine, Ed Schuyler and G. H. Barrow discuss the Roman Empire and the ancient world's art of living. Richard Ellsworth Savage, meanwhile, notices Anne Elizabeth Trent seeming to flirt with G. H. Barrow and watches him move his chair closer to her. The scene brings the Rome of intimate jealousy and social maneuvering alongside the Rome soon to host presidential ceremony.

The president among the ruins

Wilson's visit occupies the next three days. Richard Ellsworth Savage attends official functions, hears speeches in Italian, French, and English, and performs the repeated formalities of saluting and maintaining a stiff military posture. The ceremonies leave him with a literal ache in his back. Amid the silk hats and decorations, the Roman Forum becomes the visit's defining scene, where diplomatic speech is made to answer the weight of the past.

There, a short, mustached Italian official points out the ruins of the temple of Romulus and observes that everything bears a relation to the events of the great war. Wilson replies that the ruins should not be regarded as mere stones but as immortal symbols. The dignitaries listen closely. The Italian then turns the comparison toward the United States, saying that America possesses something greater, hidden in the hearts of its people. Wilson answers that Americans take their greatest pride in having demonstrated an immense love of humanity.

The physical staging gives the exchange an uneasy doubleness. Wilson's silk hat stands upright against time-worn columns and courses of dressed stone; when Richard Ellsworth Savage catches sight of his face among the Italian generals' plumes, he sees a cold, stony expression and a smile that seems almost applied. The president's words honor humanity, but the setting and Savage's description make the scene resistant to simple reassurance. The ruins are at once an impressive backdrop for the diplomatic language and a reminder that civilizations can leave symbols behind while their political power passes into history.

Savage's counter-reading

That evening, Richard Ellsworth Savage recounts the official receptions to Anne Elizabeth Trent at Ed Schuyler's apartment. Among what he remembers are the gold replica of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, displayed at the Capitol when Wilson was made a Roman citizen, and the president's face in the Forum. He calls the face reptilian and compares it to the likeness of an old Roman politician on a tomb along the Via Appia. From those images he draws a deliberately unsettling conclusion: Americans are the Romans of the twentieth century, though he has always wanted to be Greek.

Anne Elizabeth Trent, a great admirer of Wilson, is initially annoyed by his account. Savage is nervous and excited, and keeps talking; the private conversation refuses the calm, affirmative tone of the public speeches. He fears that people are praying for Wilson in peasant huts because they believe he will bring peace and restore the comfortable prewar world, while those same people are being ground underfoot. In his reading, the promise of peace resembles the sack of Corinth: a vision of benevolent leadership risks concealing the coercion of an imperial power. His fear is not merely that Wilson has failed to live up to a personal ideal, but that the United States may mistake its power for humanity's deliverance.

Savage's image of Roman inheritance also turns inward. He begs to remain human rather than acquire reptilian eyes, stone faces, and ink in place of blood, and rejects the prospect of becoming a Roman. The contrast between stone and living feeling condenses his response to the visit: official history monumentalizes power, while he insists on the vulnerability of people who wait for peace. Anne Elizabeth Trent eventually understands what he means, calls him an artist and her poet, and tells him she loves him. Her response briefly makes their personal attachment a refuge from the political argument; Savage embraces her, but the scene offers no resolution to the larger fear.

Meaning beyond the ceremonies

The narrative makes the visit a test of how public language is heard. Wilson's words at the Forum explicitly connect ancient monuments, the war, and American ideals. Savage's later account does not disprove those words; it places them beside the disappointed expectations and human costs that ceremonial rhetoric may leave out. The shift from the crowded official occasion to a chilly apartment, where the president's face and a replica of the Roman wolf become Savage's evidence, changes the scale of the scene from state performance to private judgment.

The visit's imagery also resonates with the book's later treatment of national commemoration. At the burial of an unidentified American war dead at Arlington National Cemetery, a formal tribute and the decorations placed on the body make the soldier a national symbol, while the narrative stresses the obscurity of the individual life behind that symbolism. Wilson brings a bouquet of poppies to the ceremony. This later appearance does not settle Savage's interpretation of the Rome visit, but it sharpens the book's recurring contrast between public ideals and particular human lives. In Rome, the danger is that America may inherit the authority of an empire while speaking in the name of humanity; in the memorial scene, the cost of national history is concentrated in a body whose name cannot be recovered.