Rome serves as more than a transit point in the Unnamed narrator’s journey: its approach turns an ordinary flight into an episode of recognition and suspicion, and its airport provides the setting for a discreet handoff. The ancient city appears briefly from above, while the activity around it belongs to the narrator’s present-day world of false identities and watchfulness.

Approach and Arrival

The aircraft announces a forty-five-minute transit at Rome–Fiumicino Airport. As it comes over the city, the Unnamed narrator sees the old Roman aqueducts clearly. He has already knocked a fellow passenger’s glasses to the floor; while both men apologize, he uses the distraction to lift the passenger’s wallet and offers him a seat so he can enjoy his first view of Rome.

The narrator examines the wallet near the aircraft’s forward galley as the cabin prepares to land. Among its contents are cash, pressed leaves, postcards, stamps, Italian money, a Diner’s Club card in the name of Harrison B. J. D., and passport photographs. One set shows Raven; another shows a round-faced man whose features the narrator recognizes as his own. The discovery makes the fellow passenger’s identity and the narrator’s own likeness part of the same unsettling sequence, though the passage does not explain why the photographs are being carried.

The Airport and Its Encounters

After landing, the Unnamed narrator notices a clean knife cut along the back of his new briefcase. The case remains unopened, and the cut appears to have been made to inspect its contents. The evidence does not identify who made it. He returns the fellow passenger’s wallet beneath the seat, leaving the flight with a new reason to distrust what has happened around him.

At Rome–Fiumicino Airport, the narrator describes the terminal as a straight-sided, contemporary building. The restaurant is to the left of the main entrance; stairs on the right lead to a post office and money exchange. While looking at paperbacks, he hears someone address him as Harry, a name he says is not his, and recognizes the speaker as his driver from London. The driver watches the area behind the narrator and appears dressed in the unmarked manner of an airline crew member, without visible shoulder badges or a uniform cap.

The driver gives a brief instruction for the next stage of the journey: the narrator is to be last off at Beirut and leave the briefcase for him to take through customs. He then adds that the hold baggage for seat nineteen is being handled, before departing. The exchange makes the airport a point of covert coordination, but the narrator’s changing names and the driver’s guarded conduct keep the meeting’s wider purpose indistinct.

Departure and Narrative Function

Rome recedes as the aircraft leaves: the Colosseum is visible behind them, described in pale, ghostly terms. The Unnamed narrator sleeps until Athens and discovers that the fellow passenger has not reboarded. He feels outmaneuvered. The quick stop therefore closes without resolving the photographs or the briefcase cut; instead, it leaves the narrator with linked signs of surveillance and an instruction to carry forward to Beirut.

The contrast between Rome’s recognizable antiquities and the airport’s functional layout gives the passage its shape. The aqueducts and Colosseum register the city as a historical landscape, while the wallet, altered identity, cut case, and customs instruction make the stop part of a contemporary intelligence operation. Rome is fleeting in the itinerary, but the discoveries made there alter the narrator’s understanding of the people and objects accompanying him.