When in Rome

""One of the advantages of being a Catholic,"" begins our guide, former editor of Hawaii magazine and frequent writer about Catholicism and gambling, ""is that you get to see a lot of beautiful naked women."" It's a blatant hook, but Hutchinson (The Book of Vices) knows how to keep a tour group together as he leads the reader through a year (1996) poking around Rome--and into the business of the vaticanisti--with a snappy style and an eye for detail. Hutchinson flirts with a gonzo persona, kvetching about what he's up against in the Curial bureaucracy when trying to get a good gossipy tidbit. If his humor is occasionally strained (as when he speculates that the pope would rather be in bed watching Beverly Hillbillies reruns), Hutchinson settles into a raconteur's tone that befits the epigrammatic company of such fellow writerly tourists as Chekhov, Twain and Martin Luther (""[The church] was too crowded, and I could not get in; so I ate a smoked herring instead""). He finds a nice balance of history, sex (oh, those Borgias), commerce, pageantry--and even a dollop of faith--as he ushers us from the Secret Archives to the Tower of Winds to Castel Gandolfo to the Scala Santa, and encounters the sampietrini, the Swiss Guard, a lot of weird relics and a number of loose canons (from Queen Christina of Sweden to ""the only man in Rome who speaks Latin""). And every few chapters our guide manages to find time to sample some little restaurant he's discovered that has the best carbonara in Rome. (June)