On Monday afternoon I'm met at my four-star hotel and assigned two handlers. First is Antonella, one of Internazionale's staff. She's in charge of my schedule and appointment logistics. The second person is my interpreter, a woman with red hair named Fiammetta. Fiammetta's usual clients are people like Jennifer Lopez, Russell Crowe and Michael Stipe. She mentions an assignment escorting the director Ridley Scott. This time she's stuck with me -- an ex-pilot from the Boston suburbs wearing 15-year-old shoes.

Fiammetta (little flame), who wears a somewhat ageless air of elegantly declining beauty, mentions that she spent 13 years working as the personal assistant for "a famous Italian director." She mentions this brusquely, as if to say, "I doubt you've heard of him." Well, maybe I haven't, but when asked who this famous director might be, what do you think she answers? I'm unsure whether to believe her, until later she presents a photograph. The picture shows a slightly younger Fiammetta, seated arm in arm with Federico Fellini on a plush sofa in a hotel lobby.

And there I go, roaring off in a taxi around Rome, en route to five national television shows, four newspapers, three radio stations -- with my own personal liaison and a translator to the stars.

At 18:00 on Tuesday I'm scheduled for my "presentazione" at Feltrinelli, one of Italy's mainstay booksellers. The store is in a large central shopping mall, which for Rome means a 300-year-old building across the street from the second-century Column of Marcus Aurelius, a few blocks between Trevi Fountain in one direction and the Pantheon in the other. (The Feltrinelli company, I'm told, is noted for owning the international rights to "Doctor Zhivago," from which it has made millions on print and film royalties.)

The presentation is basically a Q&A session, and as will be the case during every one of my media interviews, the conversation revolves around the recent spate of disasters and the reputations of the involved airlines. Essentially I hear the same questions that I've been fielding for two months from Americans, imbued with the passion and urgency of those in whose backyard two of the crashes occurred. And this is Italy, where low-cost carriers, while popular and rapidly expanding, are still a novelty whose trust is yet to be earned. People are genuinely suspicious and afraid of flying in a way I've not experienced at home.

The session opens like this:

Q: There have been several terrible crashes over the past two months or so. What do these accidents mean? Why so many? Are these small airlines safe?

A: The bunching of numerous incidents during a short window of time is certainly of concern, but it's also distracting. It's important to look at these events, awful as they are, in the larger context. Seven serious crashes over two months, although alarming, is not the same as seven crashes every two months. The number of commercial departures worldwide is approximately 40,000 daily, carrying upwards of 2 million people -- increasing at a rate of about 10 flights (give or take 150 passengers) per day. If you're prone to see a terrible omen in last summer's spell of calamities, consider this: Worldwide in 1985 there were 27 crashes and 2,392 fatalities. Among these were several of aviation's most infamous tragedies, including the JAL 747 nightmare near Tokyo (520 dead), Arrow Air in Newfoundland (256), and the Air India terrorist bombing over the North Atlantic (329). Thus far in 2005 the event and fatality totals stand at a comparatively paltry 21 and 732. Six of those 21 involved Soviet-built freighters that went down in places like Congo and Sudan.

(As for '85, it's a shame that two of indie rock's most brilliant-ever albums, "New Day Rising" and "Psychocandy," made their debut in such an otherwise notorious year.)

End of exchange. (Yes, the parenthetical was left out when talking to the Italians, though maybe I should've kept it.) The point, I hope, is taken to heart by everybody, regardless of what country they're in.

As for those allegedly negligent airlines -- we've been over this during the past couple of columns -- it's important to look at companies individually and not stereotype an entire category of carrier. The European Union is in the process of drafting an airline blacklist. The idea is a good one, but will need to be implemented fairly and carefully. (Soon, the only way to reach Mali or Cameroon might be on Air France. Is this politics or safety?) Concerns aside, the EU is a step in front of the American policy, which bans companies based on their country of origin, irrespective of an airline's specific operational standards.

After the Q&A at Feltrinelli comes another round of interviews and appearances. On Tuesday I'm penciled in for Canale 5's "Tutte le mattine" with the locally famous Maurizio Costanzo, a pudgy and irascible talk-show host roughly equivalent to Oprah in popularity. A fixture in Italy for decades, the outspoken Constanzo once survived a car bomb assassination attempt by the mob. Alberto warns me, half jokingly, "Be good, he's the most powerful man in Italy!" So now I'm picturing this volatile little man wedged behind a desk, angrily pounding his fist while dressed like Mussolini.

Notoriety, it occurred to me while cruising from show to show with my appointed minders, is a strange and challenging thing -- in any degree and especially for me. To help explain precisely what I mean, we need to revisit a conversation I had almost 20 years ago with a young girl named Dorothy Meyer. That's the same Dorothy, you might recall -- the spindly, discomfitingly beautiful model with a flair for the preposterous -- with whom I shared a near-death experience in 1986, recollected in Salon last July. One day around that same time, she and I were sitting in a Burger King restaurant on Boylston Street, in Boston's Back Bay. For reasons that escape me today, our topic of conversation was fame -- all its pleasures and pains, rewards and pitfalls, as only we could possibly imagine them. In her trademark way, Dorothy was waxing theatrical about the "sacrifices" she'd made in order to be a teenage fashion model earning thousands of dollars per photo session.

I was, all the while, bitter as hell -- crushed by the fact this exotic beauty, no matter how pretentious or annoying, had refused to indulge me romantically while nearly getting me killed. And so, in the heat of insatiable lust and jealousy, I blurted out something stupid. "Just you wait," I said to Dorothy, quasi-jokingly, choking on a French fry, "until the day when I'm a famous airline pilot."

I have no idea what I meant by that, or why I remember it so clearly, but Dorothy, who was always quicker and more attuned to amusing foible than I was, instantly burst out laughing and could hardly stop.

The gaffe, which seems so obvious today, wasn't that Patrick Smith wouldn't or couldn't become a "famous airline pilot," but that nobody could. The idea of a famous airline pilot was, and remains, ludicrous on the face of it.

Just the same, and all these years later, it makes me think: What is it that commercial flying needs and misses more than anything else right now? The answer, I believe, is a hero.

But whoever that hero (savior, maybe, is the better word) turns out to be, if anybody, it won't be an airline pilot. For just as the days of zeppelins and tuxedoed stewards are consigned to the past, so is any notion of commercial flight as anything but pedestrian. And from such a realm there's simply no room for, or the means of, fame of a meaningful and lasting kind. That's true of many professions, but it's a difficult reality for us fliers who happen also to be airflight evangelicals.

Aviation's most recognized voices and faces -- astronauts, daredevils, adventurers and writers -- have always drawn from the romantic and exciting sides of flying. The exploits of Lindbergh and Yeager are relics of ages gone by, while the talents of a Gann or Saint-Exupéry speak more to the sky itself -- they are famous not quite as pilots, but as authors -- than to the ignoble, glamourless task of carrying 200 disgruntled people from Cleveland to Seattle.

A short list of airline pilot names springs to mind -- Testrake, Grubbs, Haynes and such. But these men, unlike those others, owe their recognition not to triumph but to episodes of horror -- hijackings, catastrophes, and hard-won survival. Bravery? Nerves of steel? Who cares? This isn't the kind of notoriety any pilot wants.

But I'm afraid we're stuck with it.

All of this is going through my mind as my taxi spins through the ancient marble Disneyworld of Rome's landmarks. And by this time I'm hungry. As a connoisseur of the finest ironies, even the contrived kind, my mission becomes clear, unavoidable, and a travesty of travesties in this city of gastronomic extravagance -- to stop and have dinner in Burger King.

Which I almost do.

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