Among the educated, jet-setting class, eating at McDonald’s is like making out with your cousin. You may do it, but you don’t speak of it. Still, the first time I visited Rome, a super-sized effigy of the clown himself looked down on me from a second floor balcony on Via del Corso, the main shopping drag. Adopting the classic contraposto stance, one hand raised, fingertips pressed together as if to draw an invisible curtain, Ronald McDonald inveigled pedestrians, as if to say, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, come and eat here.”

I’d read Shakespeare enough to understand the mixed blessing of Mark Anthony’s funeral oration. On the one hand Julius Caesar would be avenged. On the other, the Senate and People of Rome would enter into the longest living dictatorship in western history. Some of those dictators, like Augustus, Claudius, Hadrian, or Marcus Aurelius would be benign, while others, like Caligula, Commodus, or Heliogabalus, would be the craziest fucks the world has ever known.

As a born and bred Yankee it’s difficult to imagine living with any dictator, but the Romans who heard Mark Anthony speak were so tired of the war and chaos the splintering Roman Republic had engendered they were willing to follow the most persuasive leader if it meant getting their houses in order and doing what classical Romans did best, commerce. They’d built an empire on a stable world market in which they could buy and sell goods. Brutus and Cassius and their right honorable friends killed Caesar in the name of freedom, but they didn’t understand that Romans wanted stability more than freedom.

I wanted something cold to drink on Via del Corso, where it was 42 degrees Celsius in the shade and I was exHAUSted, as a Roman friend of mine said it, always making me think she meant a fatigue you only felt after your lungs spent half a day filtering oxygen from Vespa fumes.

I was overwhelmed from a morning walk that took me from one end of the Field of Mars to the other. In the waning years of the Roman Republic the military trained in this field, which was named for the god of war. In early imperial days it became a place for monumental architecture, something like the Capitol Mall in Washington DC. Now, it’s enveloped by the city and its monuments remain like rock formations of an earlier era, islands in a lava flow. I’d begun that morning at the Pantheon, the temple consecrated to all deities found within the empire, and navigated the narrow medieval streets, dodging scooters and Smart Cars around every blind corner, trying not to trip on the volcanic rock cobbles, until I’d found the Ara Pacis, the altar of peace, it’s marble reliefs a testament to the Pax Romana.

This particular monument stands alone now, cordoned off from its original intent as propaganda for Augustus, encased inside a modern architectural oddity, a building in Rome’s centro storico designed by an American. Richard Meier, known for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, completed this smaller museum with travertine marble blocks and glass walls in 2006. The museum shares the piazza it sits in with the only other modern buildings in central Rome, two fascist behemoths built before World War II. Critical reception of Meier’s new museum was decidedly mixed. Enough Romans felt put off by it that one mayoral candidate, Gianni Alamenno, pledged to take the building apart brick by brick. Once Alamenno won the election he made good on his promise by taking down just part of one wall. Even New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, panned Meier’s museum in his review, calling out the architect’s Mussolini-sized ego.

But egomaniacal architecture should surprise no one who’s acquainted with Rome. After all, this town gave us the emperor Nero, who, just a few miles from here built the Domus Aurea, the golden house, a 200-acre palace built atop the smoldering ruins of the Esquiline Hill. Imagine the house Elvis Presley would’ve built with unlimited resources had Memphis, Tennessee burnt to the ground. With his new house complete, Nero stood on the threshold and said, “Finally, I can live like a human being.” But before the ink had dried on his housewarming invitations, the commercial class, whom he’d taxed into poverty, turned against him. Honor bound to commit suicide, Nero killed himself, but not before he said, “Today, the world loses a great artist.” When the dust settled on the subsequent civil war, the new emperor, Vespasian, buried Nero’s golden house and topped it with a public bath.

Modern excavations uncovered Vespasian’s hydrocaust—the giant furnace for heating the caldarium—in Nero’s dining room. The frescoes of the domed ceiling saw light once more in the renaissance. Rafael’s painting students belayed through a hole in the ground and, by the flaps and freaks of torchlight, found portraits of Heracles, nymphs, and centaurs, for which they invented the word grotesque. They mistook Nero’s decor for the work of troglodytes, went to their graves thinking they’d discovered caveman art.

How much of one thing is taken for another in the Eternal City? Vespasian melted the 120-foot-tall bronze likeness Nero had commissioned of himself and created statues to commemorate he and his heirs. The bronze ceiling of the Pantheon became Bernini’s baroque baldachino—that canopied centerpiece of St. Peter’s Cathedral. Early Christians did forgo melting a bronze equestrian of Marcus Aurelius, but only because they mistook the philosopher king for Constantine, that ruler who adopted the cross because—to him—it resembled a giant sword.

On the north end of the Field of Mars, beside the Flaminian Gate, just inside the Aurelian Wall, the 3^rd century AD boundary of the imperial city, in the basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, two Caravaggio paintings taking the cross as their central figure—Crucifixion of Saint Peter and Conversion on the Road to Damascus—hang across from one another in a chapel to the left of the apse. Here you’re apt to see a nun on her knees praying just to turn around and see a Spaniard in a t-shirt designed with the logo of a well-known social networking website, but reading “fuckbook.” Thus the sacred rubs shoulders with the profane in this city. Many pious Romans from the Christian era rest under the floor in this church, but according to legend, the emperor Nero is buried here too. Pope Paschal II put the church here in the twelfth century to exorcise Nero’s ghost, who haunted the neighborhood in the guise of a crow.

Maybe Nero couldn’t rest because history—with the help of Tacitus and Suetonius, the 2^nd century Roman historian and gossip columnist, respectively—had transformed him into a clown, slandered him as a lyre-playing moron not equipped to handle national crisis, and yet, for a generation after his forced abdication and suicide, his supporters openly mourned and left flowers at his grave. Who knows the real Nero? Who could tell you if they did?

An archeology professor I studied with says Nero arrived before his time. Had he come a few generations later—when the Roman tax base had expanded significantly—he may have been remembered as a good emperor. My professor also said archeologists owe Mussolini a debt for the work his government did to excavate and restore Roman ruins. Archeology was Mussolini’s propaganda, a way for him to legitimate his government’s imperial aims. For a few modern Italians, the message still resonates. I spoke with one architecture student in Rome who offered a full apology for fascism. The Germans got it wrong, he said, Italian fascism was an intellectual movement. It was about presenting art and culture to the world. On the other hand, a Roman friend of mine who studied fascism at university told me the movement never enjoyed popular support, although in its early years it did attract many farm and factory owners who feared a growing interest in communism among their workers. What can’t be disputed, though, is that Mussolini wanted to recapture the glory of Imperial Rome, and he styled himself as a latter-day Caesar. He even waxed poetic when he spoke of ruins, saying they should stand “in isolated splendor.” But how does one divine a dictator’s heart? Where did Mussolini’s shtick end and his true feelings begin?

Another Italian friend of mine, whose grandfather was a minister in Mussolini’s government, agrees that fascism appealed to factory and landowners who up until the early 20^th century had treated their workers like animals. Her grandfather had been one of the intellectual architects of fascism; then, after voting to oust Mussolini in 1943, as Rome collapsed under allied pressure, he fled the country. My friend says a hundred years ago it was difficult for many wealthy Italians to respect the law or to put community above personal happiness. In her grandfather’s mind, fascism was a necessary step in Italy between feudalism and modernism.

It’s tempting to look for a trait in the Italian character, a fascist gene. But if we judge Italians we also judge ourselves. It wasn’t just half a millennia of dictatorship the people of the Pax Romana lived with; it was a blueprint for future western leaders. Napoleon built Roman-style victory arches and posed in togas. Mussolini worshipped the Caesars, yes, but it wasn’t just dictators that emulated Roman emperors. Abraham Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois looks just like a smaller version of the emperor Hadrian’s tomb in Rome. In more current affairs, President Bush consolidated power in the executive branch as the chaos of terrorism disturbed the national psyche. And President Obama has benefitted from the public’s insecurity regarding the economy. It’s not just a classical Roman desire for stability that enables charismatic leaders to hold power. It’s a human desire. As much as we want to control our own fate, we also want rules. We need structure. Freud says the ultimate expression of this desire is our belief in God.

Il Duce’s last words were, “Shoot me in the chest!” I don’t know if he thought Italy’s heart would break with his or if he meant to parody Captain Renault from Casablanca who, when Humphrey Bogart aims a pistol at his heart, says, “That is my least vulnerable spot.” Was Mussolini “the biggest bluff in Europe,” as Hemingway once wrote, or had he become like a clown who couldn’t tell reality from his own jokes? Either way, today, on Via delle Muratte, just down the street from McDonald’s, where venders sell posters of Frank Sinatra, Sophia Loren, and Che Guavara, you can buy a poster of Mussolini striking the pose of a classical orator. The marketplace does not judge good and evil. The marketplace buys and sells. And you can say what you want about Ronald McDonald, but you can’t say the clown doesn’t sell.