While the Romans rebuild the Italian Open stadium, this year’s feature matches will be played on the smaller Nicola Pietrangeli Court, the scenic arena of all-marble steps surrounded by Michelangelo-esque statues that Mussolini ordered built in 1928.

L. Jon Wertheim has an excellent piece about the court that once was called the Pallacorda in his column on the back page of the May issue of Tennis magazine. That article is not available online, but you can read Wertheim’s 2005 ode to this historic tennis setting in Sports Illustrated calling it the “world’s best court.”

Another brilliant piece of writing about this hallowed tennis arena comes from the 1978 memoir A Handful of Summers by the South African player Gordon Forbes. Forbes played the tour in the fifties and sixties, and can claim a French Open mixed doubles championship, but he may have been a better writer than tennis player. He wrote this about his visit to the Italian Open in 1955 (the site where the tournament is played is known as the Foro Italico).

The tennis stadium in Rome, called Foro Italico, is a heavy marble affair, with sunken courts, red, wet surfaces, slow and soft as Mozzarella cheese. Tennis in slow motion, under a Mediterranean sun, watched by statues and cypresses. Here the net-rushers curse and toil, and the groundstrokers adjust their grips, lick their lips and pound away at their top-spins, with all the time in the world. The club house, also marble, smells of cappuccino and overlooks the outside courts. Arriving at Foro Italico on the opening day of the Italian championships, one is struck dumb by hundreds of groundstrokes. Every young Italian player of any consequence sports immaculate forehands and backhands. Stand at the railings of the little cafeteria and look down over the sunken courts, and all you will see are the thousands of them, deep and heavy. Balls moving back and forth, carrying the marks of the wet, red clay.

A Handful of Summers is hard to find today, with only four used copies listed on Amazon, the cheapest one starting at $92.65. I feel lucky to have found my copy last year for $5.95 in a used bookstore bordering the University of Pennsylvania campus.

Forbes, who made no money when he played in the days of amateur tennis, is the father of Gavin Duncan Forbes, a player who didn’t excel on the court but is at the financial pinnacle of today’s game as senior vice president for IMG, the enormous sports agency. The New York Daily News in 2006 described him as among “the most influential agents in the sports.” Maybe he should take a break from big deals and try to get his father’s book back into print.