So where was the shamrock? There was bad news for those members of the small Irish community who gathered at the Irish Franciscan Church of St Isidore for the traditional tri-lingual (Irish, English and Italian) St Patrick's Day Mass yesterday. No shamrock was to be had.
In times gone by, Rome's Irish community relied on the national carrier, Aer Lingus, for a supply of the national leaf.
Yesterday, however, the Irish community fell victim to "the cuts" as Aer Lingus for once failed to deliver, leaving many a lapel in a state of shameless shamrocklessness.
Not, mind you, that the absence of shamrock stopped the Irish community from going about its traditional St Patrick's Day business, starting off the weekend with the annual Celtic Ball in Rome's Sheraton Hotel last Saturday night and concluding it with a performance of Brian Friel's The Enemy Within at the Pontifical Irish College last night.
Nor did either the lack of shamrock or indeed Paddy's Day celebrations make much of an impact on the inhabitants of the Eternal City, for whom yesterday was just another warm and sunny Sunday (21 deg) in a balmy and early Roman spring.
Even the Eternal City's most famous inhabitant, Pope John Paul II, paid no attention either to St Patrick or the shamrock.
Given that St Patrick's Day fell on a Sunday, there had been the expectation of a few words about Ireland during his traditional Sunday Angelus address in St Peter's Square.
In the end, however, the Pope fittingly devoted his homily to much more pressing and painful matters, namely the brutal murder of the Archbishop of Cali, Colombia, Monsignor Isaias Duarte Cancino, famous for his anti-drug cartel diatribes and gunned down outside the parish church of the Good Shepherd in Cali on Saturday evening, just minutes after he had presided over a number of marriage services. "He was a generous and courageous pastor, who paid a high price for his energetic defence of human life, for his stern opposition to all forms of violence and for his committed social work," the Pope said of Archbishop Duarte.
With or without a shamrock, the late Archbishop of Cali was probably a man of whom St Patrick would have approved.