The party was, I can only say, a howling success.

 From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 239.

I, meanwhile, was mixing with the other guests. They were at least 90% male, and 80% churchmen. It was a world with which I was totally unfamiliar, and I was fascinated. There could have been no more exciting moment to be in Rome. Pope John XXIII had died less than a month before, and it was less than a week since the Conclave had elected as his successor Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini of Milan, who had chosen the title of Paul vi. There were now to be two or three days of celebration and preparation, building up to the great service of Coronation itself—which, in view of the heat, it had been rather imaginatively decided to hold not in St. Peter’s itself but on the outer loggia, with the congregation filling the Bernini Piazza just below. The talk at the reception, not surprisingly, was of nothing else. Most of it, I was intrigued to find, turned on clothes. Somebody had found a little man just behind the Porta Pia who could run you up a really lovely little chasuble in a couple of days for practically nothing; somebody else expressed extreme surprise that the College of Cardinals was was to be in white, not red, for the Coronation; and everybody was horrified by the brand new Triple Crown, a gift from the people of Milan and apparently made of chromium, which was to be lowered on to the papal head. “Ut lükes more like a büllet,” remarked the intensely Scottish Cardinal Heard, who after some sixty years in Rome had never lost the accent of his homeland. 

 

On the eve of the Coronation there was another much larger reception, given by the Vatican authorities for all the special representatives and delegations attending. The heat was savage. We were all encased in sweltering woollen uniforms—the Duke resplendent in scarlet and gold (one or two of the more unobtrusive buttons having been surreptitiously replaced by safety pins), myself rather more sober in diplomatic dress, black with a certain amount of gold braid but in my view nowhere near enough, a sword clanking at my side. Cars in those days had no air conditioning, and we had to queue for a good half hour in the sun until we could be deposited at the end of the waiting red carpet—only to find another queue, almost as long, winding through the vestibule and up the long flight of stairs leading to the celebrated Borgia Apartments in which the party was to be held. While we were waiting, the British Minister to the Holy See Peter Scarlett, who had been Head of Chancery in Paris under my father, murmured “Watch the drinks, they’re lethal.” I assumed this to be a joke about the Borgias—(plenty of people would say, “we’re dining with the Borgias tonight,” but nobody ever said, “we dined with the Borgias last night.”)—and laughed politely; by this time I needed a drink so badly that I would hardly have cared whether it was poisoned or not. At last we arrived—and there was exactly what I had been dreaming of: a long, long line of tables, white damask cloths to the ground, bearing row upon row of huge wine glasses, all full to the brim with an almost colorless liquid, their surfaces dripping with condensation like a television commercial. “A lovely dry Soave,” I thought to myself, seized the nearest glass, took a mighty swig—and choked. It was a dry martini—one of the largest and most powerful that I have ever encountered. I saw Peter smile. “I told you so,” he said. “Until a few years ago people coming to the Vatican were lucky if they got an eggcupful of warm Vermouth; but then a number of young American monsignor arrived—and they’ve gingered the place up a lot.” The party was, I can only say, a howling success.