8 books that evoke the spirit of Rome

Times

25-04-2025

Pope Francis's funeral is a reminder of Rome's twin historic roles as imperial capital and the headquarters of the Roman Catholic church. Its combination of beauty, power and antiquity has inspired travelling writers from Goethe to Henry James, as well as Italian greats who called it home, such as Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. Whether you're going to be in the front row at St Peter's this weekend or are just planning your next visit, this is what to read for a glimpse of life down the centuries in the Eternal City.
While Robert Harris's Conclave (2016), recently filmed, captures the drama surrounding the election of a new pope, this historical novel — the first in a trilogy — is perhaps his masterpiece. Told by the secretary of Cicero (106-43BC), it charts the rise of the orator and statesman. The elements of a thriller are supplied by the political manoeuvrings and power games of allies and rivals such as Pompey and Julius Caesar, with Harris drawing directly from Cicero's speeches and contemporary sources to fashion a vivid mosaic of life in the last years of the Republic.
Before Tom Holland's recent translation of Suetonius, the historian of the Caesars, the best-known version was by Robert Graves. It inspired him to write this gripping fictional memoir by the Emperor Claudius, who ruled from AD41-54. Dismissed because of his limp and stutter as no threat to more ambitious members of his family, Claudius is witness to the vices and (literal) backstabbing of the early Roman Empire until his survival instincts bring him the throne after Caligula's assassination. The novel (made into a celebrated TV series in 1976) is the template for every internecine power struggle saga from Dynasty to Succession.
Benvenuto Cellini was one of the finest sculptors and goldsmiths of the late Renaissance, but he is now chiefly remembered for writing his era's liveliest autobiography, even though it wasn't published until the 18th century. The rumbustious Cellini takes us into Rome's inns and palaces, fights brawls and conjures up spirits in the ruins of the Colosseum as he mixes with cardinals, cardsharps and not a few women. His stories of his part in the sack of Rome in 1527 by troops of the Holy Roman Empire, or of his escape from prison after being accused of stealing the Pope's jewels, may be exaggerated, yet nothing betters his evocation of those who made the age.
Rome was for centuries an essential stop on the Grand Tour, part of the education of well-born visitors such as the great chronicler of the Gilded Age, Edith Wharton. Although more associated with France, where she settled, the American author spent a lot of time in Italy. In this short story, a characteristic exploration of feminine social competitiveness, two friends, rich widows from New York, look out at the Forum as they recall the trip to the city that preceded their marriages. As ruthless as Roman senators, each thinks they have done better than the other. Wharton's laconic revelatory twist is as devastating as any in fiction.
After the war Italy was transformed by an economic boom, which was captured by the films of the period. Italian directors such as Federico Fellini briefly turned Rome into the most glamorous city in Europe, teeming with foreign film stars — Roman Holiday and Cleopatra were made at the Cinecittà studios — as well as the paparazzi chasing shots of them. Shawn Levy's history of Hollywood-on-the-Tiber may be gossipy, but it also lifts the stage curtain: Marcello Mastroianni compared having to kiss the icy Anita Ekberg in the Trevi fountain to being rounded up by a Wehrmacht soldier.
Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel is ostensibly a detective story. In 1927 Don Ciccio ('Fatso') is called to investigate the murder of a woman who happens to be a friend. Then more crimes begin happening in the building where she lived, and it becomes clear that everyone is implicated. Often compared to James Joyce's writing for its experimental wordplay, Via Merulana is Gadda's excoriating portrayal of a Rome where fascism flourished because too many did nothing. The Italian language's more florid tendencies are often tricky to convey into English that reads well — the translation by William Weaver (who also did Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose) is itself a work of literature.
Robert Katz's cinematic style of writing — he also penned screenplays, such as that for the 1970s disaster film The Cassandra Crossing — led critics to underestimate his abilities as a historian. This is the most readable account of the Nazi occupation of Rome and the resistance to it — for instance by the Irish priest Hugh O'Flaherty, who has inspired Joseph O'Connor's recent thrillers. Partisans, spies, Jews on the run — they are all here. A new translation of arguably the greatest Italian novel depicting the time, Elsa Morante's History, is due from Penguin next year.
Before he himself was known as a mould-breaking director, Pier Paolo Pasolini made his name as a poet and novelist, focusing in particular on the marginalised outsiders who were to become the subjects of his early films. Ragazzi di vita showed another Rome to that of the Dolce Vita, where its working-class youth had to hustle and scam to get by, living day to day and without care for morality. Pasolini's stories may be influenced by his Marxism and homosexuality, but the vigour and vision is universal.