"What are you going to DO with it?" is a question all Latin majors hear a hundred times. All I can reply is, at age 56, I'm gainfully employed and have never missed a meal.

I spent my junior year abroad at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. Columbia generously applied my financial aid to the program, as they were a participant in it, and the rest I scraped together with NDEA loans. It was perhaps the most splendid year of my life.

Rome in those days still had a faint echo of the "dopoguerra," the after-the-war purity to it. Italians remembered World War II vividly and were very glad to have survived it. Today Italy is much more prosperous, much more bourgeois and sleek. Much more expensive! It was 615 Lira to the dollar then and 10,000 Lira was a fortune. You could dine extremely well for about 2,000 Lira and a caffe was about 100 Lira plus a 10 Lira tip you dropped into the barista's tip-jar.

So much more was open then. You could climb all over the Colosseum, buy a bag of cherries and wander through the Forum eating them, visit forbidden churches like San Stefano in Rotondo by slipping the lady custodian a small "mancia" or tip. You could walk right into the American Embassy on the Via Veneto. There wasn't even a fence around it.

From Rome we students hitch-hiked freely all over the place, to Florence, Perugia, Venice, Orvieto. During Christmas break I visited Istanbul, riding the Orient Express (inspired by James Bond in "From Russia With Love"!), saw the ruins of Troy, Pergamum and Ephesus. The school itself led a two-week tour to Southern Italy and Sicily that lingers in memory. Sicily was still horribly poor in those days, and the slums of Gela and the back streets of Palermo had a certain ferocious atmosphere in their shadowy corners.

That year confirmed my fascination with Latin, Greek and classical antiquity. I've been trying to recreate it, by reading and collecting old books, ever since. I've built up an impressive library. But there is no substitute for being 18-turning-19 and having all of Italy and much of Europe thrown open to you like the sparkling Cave of Ali Baba. I spent only two days at Ravenna, but the glitter of those mosaics in S. Vitale and S. Apollinare in Classe and the tomb of Galla Placidia has stayed with me as a personal pinnacle of delight. I am very grateful to Columbia for having afforded me this opportunity to see a wider world.

As I write these lines, my son, who has just completed his freshman year at the College, is immersed in a six-week intensive Arabic course in Tunisia. At Columbia he is studying Latin and Sanskrit, as well as the core curriculum. Heaven knows what he will do with it all. But I'm not worried.

(Photo images: tombs on the Via Appia in the winter of 1969, and the interior of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, taken in December 1968. The date on the edge of the photo refers to the date I had the film developed, not the date on which it was taken.)