The two of them dumped their bags in their room and strode down the stairs and into the night. The square was uncluttered with drinkers at tables, the ordinances of the city forbidding this in the square before the palace itself, and only small knots of tourists like themselves occupied the piazza, save for the guardsmen stationed decoratively before the basilica itself. They walked across the mosaics of the piazza, through a night that seemed to be hushed before the magnificence of the buildings.