Rome Stories

Author(s): Keates, Jonathan
Binding: Hardback,
Date of Publication: 02/03/2017,
Pagination: 400 pages,
ISBN13\EAN\SKU: 9781841596228,
Description:

During its three-thousand-year

history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation and the

spiritual core of a great world religion. For writers from antiquity to the

present, however, the place holds an alternative significance as a realm of

fantasy, aspiration and desire. Captivating and lethal at one and the same

moment, its fatal gift of beauty both transfigures and betrays those in

thrall to it. Rome Stories explores

the city's fateful impact through the writing of classical historians, a

Renaissance sculptor, 18th-century tourists, American, British and French

novelists and the authors of modern Rome, each testing and unravelling the

city's ageless paradoxes. Gibbon

admires the Last of the Tribunes, Goethe decodes the mysteries of the

Carnival and Stendhal's subversive aristocrats mingle revolution with a

little cross-dressing amid their gilt mirrors and frescoed ceilings From Plutarch to Pasolini, from Hawthorne

to Wharton, the city of Caesars and popes, of dreamers, chancers and hustlers

confronts the questing imagination with its eternally unflinching gaze.