Dig your nails deep enough into the back of a Soviet, and eventually you'll find a Russian.

The city was in a panic, though a panic in Italy means most people still stand around coffee bars drinking espresso and Prosecco.

Only the passionate were immortal, it seemed. If you fought, screwed, screamed, laughed, or otherwise experienced life intensely, for better or worse, you left a record. Those who lived a quiet, well-behaved, well-tempered life? Gone without a trace.

[P]erhaps the burrows in which our lives were spent really were dark and dirty, and perhaps we ourselves were well suited to these burrows, but in the blue sky above our heads, up among the thinly scattered stars, there were special, artificial points of gleaming light, creeping unhurriedly through the constellations, points created here out of steel, semiconductors, and electricity, and now flying through space. And every one of us, even the blue-faced alcoholic we had passed on the way here, huddling like a toad in a snowdrift, even Mitiok's brother, and of course Mitiok and I — we all had our own little embassy up there in the cold pure blueness.

I've played Romeo for Juliet
(But in depth)
It's vignettes of silhouettes
(And then read)
And watched Russian roulette, yeah red Soviet
Yet doing it simultaneously
While dropping down shed oubliettes
Turned around and took truth to the head that
Love is the ugliest thing too beautiful for death

Florence could feel a constriction in her chest…She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the speed of her galloping heartbeat…Now they had summoned her. And they knew everything