If I was awarded a fellowship to live and write (whatever I would like) in the city of Rome for one year, I think I’d look at the city in a somewhat positive light. Writing about the city would be a sort of thank you for the opportunity, and the resulting work might feel like a travel brochure sitting lonely in a rack in front of the tourist agency.
However, the author of this book certainly made a go of it and describes his and his family’s year in Rome with such care and attention to details that make you wonder if you live in the same world as he does. He has a unique writing style (which he is happy to describe in the pages of this book) that describes just the right details from a given moment enough to allow the reader to visualize and feel it, without going too far and making it clinical.
I enjoyed his writing style in Cloud Cuckoo Land, so I was happy to find that it is here in non-fictional writing as well. Having breezed through Rome myself during our honeymoon trip, it was nice to see the details that we missed. The author was uniquely situated to be there for the previous Pope’s death and the subsequent conclave of Cardinals and choice of a successor. He and his wife had a chance to explore the surrounding areas and see a little deeper.
Surprisingly the author and his wife had had twins just three months before arriving in Rome, and so there is plenty of nervous parenting going on in this book, but also the twins serve a way for us to see a very old city in a fresh way.
On top of all this, I always like books where people drop everything and start somewhere new, so this book really hit all the right notes for me.
I haven’t chosen the next book to read yet – I’ll probably pick something over this weekend. Lots of books on the list!
