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Writer Clara Burger arrives in Rome in 2009 to clear the flat of her school friend Ines, who has died prematurely from cancer. Sorting through Ines' belongings, Clara finds a manuscript containing an autobiographical account of strange experiences that Ines had while working as a chambermaid in Rome in the summer of 1978. Wrapped up with her diaries, Clara also discovers the life story of Ines' former employer, the hotelier Emma Manente. An ethnic German from Italy's troubled South Tyrol region like Clara and Ines, Emma first came to Rome in the late 1930s and became an eyewitness to the turbulent events of the subsequent decades: Benito Mussolini's fascist regime, the Nazi occupation, and the uneasy post-war democracy threatened by corruption and extremism.A sweeping tale of remembrance and reconciliation, of lives unfulfilled and loves unrequited, Roman Elegy tells the personal stories of these three resilient women and how they came to terms with the times in which they lived. The narratives are woven together with a fascinating historical perspective on the Eternal City in all its contrasting squalor and beauty, compassion and savagery.Sabine Gruber was born in 1963 in Merano, Italy, and has published widely, with a particular focus on the work of the South Tyrolean author Anita Pichler. She was awarded the 2008 Linz Book Prize for her previous novel Overnight, which was also long-listed for the German Book Prize.

Praise for the original 1968 edition:\"A Killing for Christ is a fast-paced, topical thriller...Hamill's prose is stylishly punchy...I would guess that Hamill admires Hemingway, Jimmy Breslin, and Mickey Spillane--not always in that order.\"--New York Times\"The Helen Macinnes touch...the Hitchcock air.\"--Philadelphia Inquirer\"The style and substance of this first novel owes much to hardboiled, gutsy, private-eye fiction and to a general submersion into obscenity and violence.\"--Kirkus ReviewsA secret agent out of John le Carré...a spoiled priest-hero out of Graham Greene...a high-voltage novel of suspense that is Pete Hamill's own. The man in priest's garb gets out of the elevator at the top floor, leaving the gate ajar. He removes the rifle from under his habit and opens the breech. It's loaded. He closes it and steps to the edge of the roof. St. Peter's Square is spread out before him like a great, colorful lake. There are more people than he has ever seen before. There are priests and monsignors all in royal purple, sitting on all sides of an altar.Now the target arrives. The man on top of the building sights down the rifle at the small figure below. His finger is ready on the trigger, ready to gun down His Holiness, the Vicar of Christ...

Pat Conroy’s work as a novelist and a memoirist has indelibly shaped the image of the American South in the cultural imagination. His writing has rendered the physical landscape of the South Carolina lowcountry familiar to legions of readers, and it has staked out a more complex geography as well, one defined by domestic trauma, racial anxiety, religious uncertainty, and cultural ambivalence. In Understanding Pat Conroy, Catherine Seltzer engages in a sustained consideration of Conroy and his work. The study begins with a sketch of Conroy’s biography, a narrative that, while fascinating in its own right, is employed here to illuminate many of the motifs and characters that define his work and to locate him within southern literary tradition. The volume then moves on to explore each of Conroy’s major works, tracing the evolution of the themes within and among each of his novels, including The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music, and South of Broad, and his memoirs, among them The Water Is Wide and My Losing Season. Seltzer’s insightful close readings of Conroy’s work are supplemented by interviews and archival material, shedding new light on the often-complex dynamics between text and context in Conroy’s oeuvre. More broadly Understanding Pat Conroy also explores the ways that Conroy delights in troubling the boundaries that circumscribe the literary establishment. Seltzer links Conroy’s work to existing debates about the contemporary American canon, and, like Conroy’s work itself, Understanding Pat Conroy will be of interest to his readers, students of American literature, and new and veteran South watchers.

City of the Soul critically examines how an international cast of visitors fashioned Rome's image, visual and literary, in the century between 1770 and 1870-from the era of the Grand Tour to the onset of mass tourism. The Eternal City emerges not only as an intensely physical place but also as a romantic idea onto which artists and writers projected their own imaginations and longings. The book will appeal to a wide audience of readers interested in the history of art, architecture, and photography, the Romantic poets, and other writers from Byron to Henry James. It will also attract the interest of historians of urbanism, landscape, and Italy. Nonspecialists and armchair travelers will enjoy the diverse literary and artistic responses to Rome.

\"Legendary Rome\" is the first book to offer a comparative treatment of the reinvention of Rome's origins in the poetry of Vergil, Tibullus and Propertius. It also examines the impact that the changing topography of Rome, as orchestrated by the emperor Augustus, had on those poets' renditions of Rome's legendary past. When the poets explore the significance of Augustus' reconstruction of the Palatine and Capitoline hills, they create new meaning and memories for the story of Rome's legendary foundations. As the tradition of Rome's mythic and legendary origins evolves through each poetic revision, the past transforms and is reinvented anew.The exploration of what constitutes a civilised landscape for each poet leads to significant conclusions about the dynamic and evolving nature of shared public memories. Written when Rome was in the process of defining a new, post-war identity, the poems studied here capture the growing tension between community and individual development, the restoration of peace versus expansion through military means, and stability and change within the city.

Pliny the Younger (c. 60–112 CE)—senator and consul in the Rome of Domitian and Trajan, eyewitness to the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, early ‘persecutor’ of Christians on the Black Sea—remains the best documented Roman individual, other than emperors, between Cicero and Augustine. Standard biographical approaches rarely suit him. But no Roman writer, not even Vergil, ties his identity to the regions of Italy more successfully than Pliny. His individuality can be captured by focusing on the range of locales in which he lived, including Comum, Umbria and Rome. What is Pliny’s attachment or relationship to a region? What is his persona, and what does he do there? What does he see, or not see, in a landscape or its inhabitants? Why does he play Comum up or play Umbria down? A strong thread of linear narration is maintained. In his youth Pliny spent a period of time on the bay of Naples alongside his famous uncle, the Elder Pliny, author of the Natural History. It was while here he witnessed the catastrophe of 79. Pliny spent the last years of his life as governor in the province of Pontus-Bithynia in northwest Turkey, in a landscape and political milieu quite different from the one he had known in Italy. Four figures from the classical past, present, and future accompany Pliny: Cicero, Tacitus, Epictetus, and Augustine.

Italian novelist, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally killed in Rome in 1975, a macabre end to a career that often explored humanity’s capacity for violence and cruelty. Along with the mystery of his murderer’s identity, Pasolini left behind a controversial but acclaimed oeuvre as well as a final quartet of beguiling projects that signaled a radical change in his aesthetics and view of reality. The Resurrection of the Body is an original and compelling interpretation of these final works: the screenplay Saint Paul, the scenario for Porn-Theo-Colossal, the immense and unfinished novel Petrolio, and his notorious final film, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, a disturbing adaptation of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Together these works, Armando Maggi contends, reveal Pasolini’s obsession with sodomy and its role within his apocalyptic view of Western society. One of the first studies to explore the ramifications of Pasolini’s homosexuality, The Resurrection of the Body also breaks new ground by putting his work into fruitful conversation with an array of other thinkers such as Freud, Strindberg, Swift, Henri Michaux, and Norman O. Brown.

Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire examines the notions of ethnicity, citizenship and nationhood, to determine what constituted cultural identity in the Roman Empire. The contributors draw together the most recent research and use diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives from archaeology, classical studies and ancient history to challenge our basic assumptions of Romanization and how parts of Europe became incorporated into a Roman culture. Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire breaks new ground, arguing that the idea of a unified and easily defined Roman culture is over-simplistic and offering alternative theories and models. This well-documented and timely book presents cultural identity throughout the Roman Empire as a complex and diverse issue, far removed from the previous notion of a dichotomy between the Roman invaders and the Barbarian conquered.

Arendt's citations in this review stem notably from a dozen pages in the middle of the novel where Broch himself evokes motifs form the fourth Eclogue, including the key line magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, rendered in one passage of dialogue between Virgil and Caesar Augustus as 'the glory of the ages [that has] been fulfilled by out time'. The poet avers that 'We stand between epochs' in a way that must be called 'expectancy, not emptiness', to which the emperor rejoins. A pages earlier, the ailing poet, contemplating burning the manuscript of The Aeneid in a fit of despair, broods that a reason for poetic endeavour 'no longer exists'; to which Augustus gain retorts. Adapted from the source document.

A few years into the nineteenth century, Alessandro Verri, one of Italy’s most famous authors, sketched out a few sentences on how humans experienced time. Our minds, he suggested, are embroiled in a claustrophobic struggle against thenow: The human intellect, never satisfied by the narrow confines of the present, throws itself toward these two extremes [past and future], and aspires to a greater dominion, and tries ever to spread its faculties and extend itself in sweeping meditations…. By different means the spirit pulls in different directions, but all confirm the innate longing to extend oneself through the discernible world