From Livy to Henry James, from Cellini to Moravia, this collection of classic tales of the Eternal City draws on a wide range of brilliant writers from across the ages. A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology

During its three-thousand-year
history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation and 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 and desire. Captivating and lethal at one and the same
moment, its fatal gift of beauty both transfigures and 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 and French
novelists and the authors of modern Rome, each testing and unravelling the
city’s ageless paradoxes. Gibbon
admires the Last of the Tribunes, Goethe decodes the mysteries of the
Carnival and Stendhal’s subversive aristocrats mingle revolution with a
little cross-dressing amid their gilt mirrors and frescoed ceilings From Plutarch to Pasolini, from Hawthorne
to Wharton, the city of Caesars and popes, of dreamers, chancers and hustlers
confronts the questing imagination with its eternally unflinching gaze.