Rome and a Villa

"These essays gather up Rome and hold it before us, bristling and dense and dreamlike, with every scene drenched in the sound of fountains, of leaping and falling water." - The New Yorker"Perhaps the finest book ever to be written about a city." - New York TimesBringing to life the legendary city''s beauty and magic in all its many facets, Eleanor Clark''s masterful collection of vignettes, Rome and a Villa, has transported readers for generations.In 1947 a young american woman named Eleanor Clark went to Rome on a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel. But instead of a novel, Clark created a series of sketches of Roman life written mostly between 1948 and 1951. Wandering the streets of this legendary city, Eleanor fell under Rome''s spell-its pace of life, the wry outlook of its men and women, its magnificent history and breathtaking contribution to world culture. Rome is life itself-a sensuous, hectic, chaotic, and utterly fascinating blend of the comic and the tragic. Clark highlights Roman art and architecture, including Hadrian''s Villa-an enormous, unfinished palace-as a prism to view the city and its history, and offers a lovely portrait of the Cimitero acattolico-long known as the Protestant cemetery-where Keats, Shelley, and other foreign notables rest.