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At the soirees that the Borrés hosted or attended, U.S. diplomats, Italian politicians, and businessmen mingled with Vatican officials, bankers, and film directors. Peter, a pampered only child, grew up in that milieu.

Mussolini had given heavy state support to the 1930s Italian film industry. The dictator considered movies a powerful tool and ordered the production of proto-Fascist films for his propaganda machinery as he moved toward an alliance with Hitler.16 After the war, as American dollars rolled into Rome, Borré père did legal work for MGM and other American studios lured by the cheap production costs and solid studio infrastructure Il Duce had built. The CIA encouraged American studios to distribute films in Western Europe as a counter to Communist politics. As American producers became flush with lire, Italian law barred them from taking the funds out of local banks for conversion into dollars. With a mountain of money that the Americans had to spend locally, Italy’s postwar film industry rebounded as a Hollywood-on-the-Tiber. Charlton Heston won the 1959 Best Actor Oscar for Ben-Hur, and Peter Borré, who had just graduated from Harvard, earned lire as an Italian-English interpreter and gofer on the film’s set.

The month after he had first arrived in Italy, seven-year-old Peter was enrolled in Rome’s most prestigious Jesuit school, Istituto Massimo. The alumni included Pope Pius XII. Peter admired the teachers for their strong-minded sermons and lectures, vaunting Rome as the capital of the Catholic Church, emphasizing each man’s responsibility to further the faith. The Jesuits stressed classical learning with a rigor that seems punishing by today’s standards. The six-day-a-week schedule began with Mass at 7 a.m. and ran until 2:30 in the afternoon. Lunch was thirty minutes. In third grade he was speaking good Italian, studying Latin and algebra; in fifth grade he added Greek and French.

The school was in central Rome, near Piazza della Repubblica and Santa Maria degli Angeli (St. Mary of the Angels), a vast church begun in 1563 by Michelangelo within the ruins of the ancient baths built by Emperor Diocletian. Brown earth tones colored the shell, which opened into an interior of immense vaulted ceilings and light streams that washed the gigantic columns and multicolored marble floors. When Peter made occasional stops on silent afternoons, watching the people as they knelt in prayer, he drew a notion from the sheer size of the space, fortified by his school lessons, of his soul as a small but unique presence in the firmament. On trips to St. Peter’s Basilica he felt sorrow at Michelangelo’s Pietà, the statue of Mary in grief for the Son come down from the cross. Here was faith, close and true.

He was fourteen when his father, though pleased with his academic skills and fluency in foreign languages, worried that he could barely write in English. And so his parents sent him back to New England for prep school.

The first Mass Borré attended in the town of Andover appalled him. The church reminded him of some garish county fair; the priest so stressed the importance of contributing money as to seem a bumpkin. The beauty and size of Rome’s sacred spaces, inspiring his awe for a global faith, stood out in high relief from what he now took to be a religious backwater. He entered Harvard College at age sixteen. The disgruntlement over Boston Catholicism lingered through his undergraduate years; he was bored by sermons with all the Irish baggage that showed in the working-class people who heeded them and the homilies telling the faithful that they must pray, make confession, follow the rules, and give money. Borré’s idea of faith looked back on the urbane clerics at his parents’ dinners, the Jesuits with their emphasis on analytical thinking and a sacramental imagination shaped by the soaring beauty of Italian church interiors.

He was too young to appreciate the mystery of Jesus, a radical who scorned the powerful and embraced the outcasts of society, or to understand how