In the summer of 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic was finally slowing down, my teenage son and I took a trip to Italy. Travel restrictions had been lifted only a few days before, and Rome was almost entirely empty of tourists. It was glorious.

We wandered around the city. We stood on the Spanish Steps in the mild evening air, then continued down to the Trevi Fountain and dipped our hands in the water. We ate pasta at little tables on the sidewalks of ancient streets. At the colosseum, on a hot, bright day, we walked right in. We went to the Vatican and peered obediently up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

I’d been to the Vatican before, but as we wandered through it, almost alone, I felt as if I was seeing it for the first time. It was dripping with riches, the cup of salvation overflowing with material luxury. No ermine robe was too soft, and no dish too delicious, for the cardinals of the past. In that moment, walking through room after room of marble and silk and silver, all of it extracted from illiterate workers in the fields and fishing boats on the horizon, the reasons for the Protestant Reformation became fully clear to me. My son had taken social studies that year, and so we talked about these things a bit—the French Revolution, Karl Marx, the essential conflict between power and powerlessness, and how it continues.

There, behind the casino in the harbor, were the superyachts.

We rented a tiny car—a Fiat 500, in deep, luscious green. There were two normal seats in front, and two perches in the back where we put our bags. We drove out of Rome, down to the Amalfi Coast, and then up to Venice and the Dolomites. After a few days in the mountains, we descended to Milan, where we drove a Ferrari for fifteen minutes. We stayed in Airbnbs in the countryside, and one old woman, seeing that we were a father and son on a trip together, insisted on putting us up in her lovely farmhouse for free.

Near the end of our trip, we headed to Monaco. In front of a casino by the water, we watched a gray-haired man in his seventies, wearing a track suit, stiffly emerge from a glistening Lamborghini with an astonishing blond porcelain doll of a woman, so young she could have been his granddaughter.

It was ten o’clock in the morning. He tossed his car keys to the uniformed valet, she took his arm possessively, and they walked together up the steps into the casino.

Tall and thin, but with a distinct paunch visible beneath his track suit, the man did not look like a captain of industry. He didn’t look like much of anything, and the impression he gave was one of carelessness and boredom, as if he didn’t know what else to do, on another identical day.