Posted on 8.2 by Daily Beast‘s Barbie Latza Nadeau: “At times, it wasn’t clear if Kevin Spacey was talking about the chiseled nude bronze alongside him, the poem he was reading, or [about] himself.

“’The more you’re wounded the greater you are,’ he read with intent. ‘And the more empty you are.’

“The 60-year-old Spacey was wearing a tobacco-colored suit on a painfully humid day in front of the Greek bronze ‘Boxer at Rest’ statue at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme — the National Roman Museum — in central Rome, where the air conditioning was broken.

“He was reading Italian poet Gabriele Tinti‘s poem ‘The Boxer’, about a tired and broken fighter who has been punched and beaten, and is left bleeding by the ringside.”