Rome matters in John Marcher’s recollection less as the place where he met May Bartram than as the anchor of a memory he has got wrong. When they meet again at Weatherend, he confidently places their earlier encounter in Rome; May’s corrections establish that it happened in Naples and that Rome belonged to the journey around it, not to the meeting itself.

Place in the Journey

Nearly ten years earlier, Marcher had been traveling in the company of the Boyers, coming down from Rome. May had been with her mother and brother. The people Marcher was traveling with had made the two acquainted, but May knew the Boyers, not the Pembles whom Marcher first names in his account. Rome is thus part of the route and social circumstances behind their meeting, while Naples is its actual setting.

The Misremembered Encounter

At Weatherend, Marcher says that he remembers meeting May years before in Rome and begins supplying details with apparent confidence. May corrects the central place as well as the surrounding particulars: the meeting was in Naples, not Rome, and their companions were not as Marcher recalls. She has evidence for the distinction, and her corrections turn his confident recollection into a demonstration that he remembers very little about her accurately.

Marcher also attaches a violent thunderstorm and shelter in an excavation to the Palace of the Caesars. May places that incident at Pompeii, where they had been present for an important find. The correction separates Rome from two different strands of memory: their acquaintance in Naples and the storm at Pompeii.

Narrative Significance

Rome’s role in the scene is one of mistaken association. Marcher retains a broad outline of travel and encounter but rearranges its places and companions, while May can restore the historical sequence. Their exchange makes the past seem strikingly meagre: the pair can recover only a handful of small incidents from a meeting when she was twenty and he was twenty-five. Rome therefore marks both the limits of Marcher’s memory and the distance between his sense of a shared past and what May actually remembers.