In Italy, where I was lately loafing, the perspective on our presidential race is a little different. I first encountered it in a piazza in a small Tuscan town called Orbitello. I met a humble couple from a suburb of Venice who wanted to chat with an American tourist. Although I hadn't asked him, the man announced, "We are for Gore-Lieberman." I was somewhat taken aback because I have talked to so many Americans who said they didn't know enough about Gore to decide. It turned out all the Italian couple needed to know about George W. Bush is the large number of executions in Texas during his time as governor. La pena di morte--the death penalty--the woman intoned. The phrase reverberated through my stay.

Italians abhor capital punishment. It goes against the grain, which is that things can be worked out--an attitude that makes being in their company so delightful--and the death penalty is so arbitrary. "Just one mistaken execution is enough argument against it," a reporter for La Stampa told me. He is against the death penalty but also laments the Italian obsession with it--the parliamentary delegations that fly over to plead with U.S. governors to stay executions and the extravagant sympathies that caused one Italian municipality to claim the body of an executed U.S. criminal for an honored burial.

When I was in Rome, I went to the Coliseum one day to check out the fake gladiators who have sprung up in the wake of that summer movie and who hang around to have their pictures taken with tourists. Across the street was a white tent with a "Save Barnabei" banner strung along the length of it. The celebrity protester of the day was the mayor of Rome, Francesco Rutelli, a handsome conservative who wants to be prime minister. Derek Rocco Barnabei, a 33-year-old Italian American convicted of rape and murder, was executed in Virginia a few days later on Sept. 14.

