Rome Stories

From Plutarch to Pasolini, from Henry James to Alberto Moravia, this collection of classic tales of the Eternal City draws on a wide range of brilliant writers from ancient times to the present. A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology. EVERYMAN'S POCKET CLASSICS.

During its three-thousand-year history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation, and the spiritual core of a world religion. For writers from antiquity to the present, however, it has long served as a realm of fantasy, aspiration, and desire. Captivating and lethal at one and the same moment, its beauty both transfigures and betrays those in thrall to it. Rome Stories explores the city's fateful impact through the writing of classical historians, Renaissance sculptors, Enlightenment poets and philosophers, American, British, and French novelists, and the writers of modern Italy.

JONATHAN KEATES is the author of several works of fiction including the short story collection Allegro Postillions and the novel The Stranger's Gallery. He is the biographer of Handel, Purcell, and Stendhal, and is well known as a reviewer and writer on Italian culture and history. He teaches at the City of London School and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Preface
 
LIVY, "The Revolt Against the Tarquins" 
 
PLUTARCH, "The Murder of Julius Caesar "
 
BENVENUTO CELLINI, "Imprisonment, Escape, Recapture" 
 
EDWARD GIBBON, "The Story of Rienzi" 
 
J. W. VON GOETHE, from Italian Journey
 
STENDHAL, "Vanina Vanini" 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, from The Marble Faun
 
GEORGE ELIOT, from Middlemarch 
 
HENRY JAMES, "Daisy Miller" 
 
EDITH WHARTON, "Roman Fever" 
 
ALBERTO MORAVIA, from Roman Tales
 
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI, "A Night on the Tram"