An Evening in Rome

It was quite an experience to attend a dinner in Rome on 11 December 2025, organised by the Brussels think tank New Direction, as the first Margaret Thatcher Awards were handed out. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the recipient of the Award in Politics, delivered a brief yet powerful speech in fluent English. She is emerging as the leading European statesman, with a clearer conservative vision than either Merz in Germany or Macron in France. But while I was listening to her and the other speakers, I recalled three visits to the Eternal City from my remote, windswept country in the northwestern corner of Europe, Iceland.

Gudrid in North America

The first visit was in the late 1020s by Gudrid Thorbjornsdaughter (c. 980–c. 1050), a strong-willed woman like Thatcher and Meloni. Born in Western Iceland, Gudrid emigrated with her father to Greenland in the late 990s (Icelandic has no family names, just a first name and then information about whose son or daughter one is, for example Gudrid daughter of Thorbjorn, Einar son of Benedikt). At the age of 27, Gudrid met an Icelandic merchant, Thorfinn Thordson, who married her. In spring 1008, they, along with some other Greenlanders, decided to explore a newly discovered country in the West, sailing there on four ships. The following winter they stayed in what is now Fundy Bay (between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia), where Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorri Thorfinnson, the first child of European descent born in North America. In 1009, Gudrid and Thorfinn decided to sail south and explore more of the country. They arrived at what is now the Hudson River, where they stayed for a while. But in late 1010, the settlers clashed with some Natives. Realising that in any conflict they would be greatly outnumbered, they returned to Greenland in the summer of 1011.

Gudrid in Rome

After a while, Gudrid and Thorfinn moved to a farm in Northern Iceland. When Thorfinn died and their oldest son Snorri married, Gudrid decided to go on a pilgrimage to Rome. There, she could see many monuments still standing, such as Castel d’Angelo (originally an imperial mausoleum), the Pantheon (originally a Roman temple), and the Colosseum. As an old woman, Gudrid, by now the best-travelled person in the world, told her grandchildren stories of her journeys. Less than two centuries later, these stories were written down at the behest of her descendants, who were leading churchmen.

A Poet Reflects on the Romans

The second visit was by the poet, lawyer, and businessman Einar Benediktsson (1864–1940) in 1903. One evening, as he stood at twilight by the Tiber River, he composed one of his best-known poems, An Evening in Rome: ‘Quiet Tiber seawards slow is flowing.’ He reflected on the history of the Roman Republic and its degeneration during the Empire, concluding that what remained of value was the cultural heritage. The poem is full of metaphors and striking poetic images. Einar composed another poem about his visit to Rome, Colosseum, where the emphasis was on the cruelty of the performances in the ancient amphitheatre, as ‘Beast and man fought out their duel’.

An Engineer on the Verge of Tears

The third visit was by a prominent politician and engineer, Jón Thorláksson (1877–1935), Iceland’s Prime Minister in 1926–1927 and founder of the conservative-liberal Independence Party, which long dominated Icelandic politics. In 1923, he and his wife went to Italy on a late honeymoon. Ten years later, as Mayor of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, Jón attended a dinner on 6 July 1933 in honour of the Italian Air Marshal Italo Balbo, who had made a stopover in Iceland on a transatlantic cruise. Balbo spoke little English, so they conversed in Latin, which both had learned in school. Jón told Balbo that on his visit to Rome, he had been on the verge of tears over the destruction which time had inflicted on what had been the Forum Romanum. As a civil engineer, he was a great admirer of Roman construction techniques.