During its three-thous&-year history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation & the spiritual core of a great world religion. For writers from antiquity to the present, however, the place holds an alternative significance as a realm of fantasy, aspiration & desire. Captivating & lethal at one & the same moment, its fatal gift of beauty both transfigures & betrays those in thrall to it. Rome Stories explores the city`s fateful impact through the writing of classical historians, a Renaissance sculptor, 18th-century tourists, American, British & French novelists & the authors of modern Rome, each testing & unravelling the city`s ageless paradoxes. Gibbon admires the Last of the Tribunes, Goethe decodes the mysteries of the Carnival & Stendhal`s subversive aristocrats mingle revolution with a little cross-dressing amid their gilt mirrors & frescoed ceilings From Plutarch to Pasolini, from Hawthorne to Wharton, the city of Caesars & popes, of dreamers, chancers & hustlers confronts the questing imagination with its eternally unflinching gaze.