
In ways no guide book can achieve these twenty absorbing tales by Italian authors ranging from Boccaccio in the Middle Ages to Giacomo Casanova in the eighteenth century to Pier-Paolo Pasolini in the twentieth & contemporary new writers such as Melania Mazzucco & Igiaba Scego offer the delight of discovering & exploring one of the world's most unique cities thorough a wide variety of individual lives & epochs The tales span seven hundred years but rather than being ordered chronologically old & new appear alongside one another reflecting the dual identity of Rome
- thriving modern metropolis & ancient city centre that is one of the wonders of the world The tales are wonderfully varied in style tone & subject matter Casanova sets about seducing the hotelier's daughter only minutes after his arrival a notorious Spanish prostitute in Renaissance Rome endures a public hiding without flinching a Danish tourist in her sixties finds an unusual lover Pope John Paul II uncovers a vast conspiracy against him a medieval revolutionary demagogue suffers almost the same fate as Mussolini Each story is illustrated with a black-&-white photograph & there is a map of Rome to help readers locate the important sites which feature in the text A deep sense of timelessness of separate destinies entwined across a gulf of centuries is the cumulative effect of this vivid mosaic of dramatic comic & tragic stories set in the Eternal City