Just Passing Through

“I’m just passing through,” Milton Gendel liked to say whenever anybody asked him what he was doing in Rome. Even after seven decades in the Eternal City, he refused to be pigeonholed. He was always an American - never an “expat,” never an émigré - but he couldn’t leave, so deep were his ties, and this dual bond left an indelible imprint on his life and art. Though he was born in New York City, it was Rome that earned Gendel’s enduring fascination - the city supplied him with endless outlets for his curiosity, a series of dazzling apartments in palazzi, the great loves of his life, and the scores of friendships that made his story inextricably part of the city’s own. His diaries and photographs are a casement window thrown open onto a who’s who of artists, writers, and socialites sojourning in the city: Mark Rothko, Princess Margaret, Alexander Calder, Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal, Martha Gellhorn, Muriel Spark. His longtime home on the Isola Tiberina was the nerve center of the dolce vita