Ask a friend which European city they adore, and those who say Rome put themselves in a category unto their own. If Paris attracts the romantics, Rome seduces the sensualists. Henry James took to it almost immediately, finding the city “rubbishy” if “magnificently, sublimely so.” “No one looks handsome in Rome,” he wrote to a friend in 1871, “beside the Romans.”
The American Academy of Arts and Letters has seen to it that U.S. novelists do not forget this wisdom. Each year, it sponsors a fellowship that allows two young writers to sit in Rome’s ruined splendor and reacquaint themselves with the muse. Ralph Ellison was one of the earliest recipients. He succumbed to its charms but missed home cooking. “I couldn’t cook the trotters and spent the night cussing,” he wrote to the novelist Albert Murray about an attempt to cook pigs feet there in 1956. “… imagine a city without pickling spice!”
Boise-based novelist Anthony Doerr was one of the program’s recent fellows, and while he had less culinary complaints, disorientation was part of his daily diet. “Four Seasons in Rome,” his exquisitely written memoir of the year he spent there in 2004, has all the intimacy and wide-eyed thrust of a letter home. “In a pasta shop,” he writes early on, “a glass counter, piles of tortellini, yards of fettuccine – I manage to buy a kilogram of orange ravioli stuffed with pumpkin and ricotta, the pasta dusty with flour.”
Like all the best letters, “Four Seasons in Rome” is woven from tiny day-to-day details such as this, little victories wrenched from the hum of urban life, refined through the writing.
Doerr and his wife, Shauna, have been pitched overseas with their 9-month-old fraternal twin sons, and he spends more time worrying about them than he does the novel he’s supposed to be writing. Chronicling his boys’ miraculous development, he sees the world anew through their eyes. “I buy a carton for two euros,” he writes, “reach inside the stroller’s rain cover and hand a strawberry like a tiny glowing lamp to each of the boys.”
Seeing Italy as Thoreau would
This intensity of detail could have grown cloying, but Doerr cleverly turns this dressed-up journal into a thoughtful meditation on seeing. “The eye sees something – gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad vertical plates – and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife?”
The author of a beautiful collection of stories and a big, brawny novel of the natural world, Doerr makes a funny guide to Rome. Who else would notice the pine trees that wave down on the Vespas that beetle around the city? Or pause to note the migratory pattern of starlings in the Piazza Navona, or sketch the changing colors of the Alban Hills from the window of his studio at the Academy? “This morning (they) were shining white. Now they are heavy and black, terrible, apocalyptic.”
As lovely as Doerr’s sentences sound on the page, their tone occasionally grows mawkish, a bit drippy, as if Doerr simply can’t contain himself. “Days like this,” starts the “Summer” chapter, “the most flawless blue you could imagine, every leaf edged with gold. Tiny strawberries fatten in the garden and awnings flap and there are the big oceangoing sighs of the umbrella pines.”
Doerr clearly has a bit of Thoreau in his blood, but he’s just as good at observing people from a distance, one of the best pastimes in Rome. “Four mornings ago I watched a man chat with the baker for five minutes while a half dozen of us waited behind him,” Doerr writes in one scene, “then climb into a Mercedes and tear off at fifty miles an hour. As if he had not a single second to spare.”
“Four Seasons of Rome” is structured loosely, and told in a present tense, allowing Doerr to simply go where his mind and curiosity (and family) take him, which includes a visit to the hospital. In a few sections, he begins reading Pliny the Elder and Doerr immediately begins seeing through his eyes.
Similarly, when he was sitting on Walden Pond, Thoreau took a break from writing his own book to read. “I read one or two shallow books of travel,” he wrote, with typical censoriousness, “till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.” Doerr will never be from anywhere but Boise – that much is clear. But with this elegant journal of his year abroad, he proves how powerfully enlightening it can be to forget that for a while.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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NONFICTION
Four Seasons in Rome
On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
By Anthony Doerr
$24
