Who does not yearn for a Roman holiday? Yet if we are to take our cue from literature, trips to Rome are a risky business. Amongst the most notable examples of this phenomenon is perhaps Dorothea's honeymoon in Rome, which occurs within the opening chapters of George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'. In this novel Dorothea's trip to Rome is recorded as being like an 'electric shock' to her system, something against which she has no defence.
Another of Rome's most notable visitors is John Keats. Keats travelled to Rome under a cloud of sickness at the end of his life. His experience of Rome was dominated by the understanding that art and artists will pass into dust, a belief that led to the famous epitaph which he requested for his grave in the city, 'here lies one whose name was writ in water.'
Whilst we might not share Keats's sense of the melodramatic, a feeling of the magnitude of passing time is not lost even upon a reader who visits Rome only in the pages of a book. Nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in the image above of a 'market scene in modern Rome' from E Bocock's 'My Rambles in Rome with Notebook and Camera' (only £2). Perhaps nothing could look more different from our current notions of what is modern! Similarly, a reader will be shocked by the emptiness of the square of St Peter's, in the shot below, which is taken from Gabriel Faure's 'Rome', which was published by the Medici Society (available for just £4).
Our collection of Rome books should also protect the errant reader from another of literature's ignominious Roman fates, that of the American tourist in E.M. Forster's 'A Room with a View', who when trying to recall what sites he saw in Rome, comments that 'Rome's where we saw the yella dog.' These books will leave you in no doubt of Rome's key sites, as their maps and diagrams deliver a detail that would satisfy the most pernickety of sightseers. The two examples below both show the Roman forum. The fold out map is from T H Dyer's 'The City of Rome' (£7) and the other is from S. Russell Forbes's 'Rambles in Rome' (£3).
Above all, what these books capture is a sense of Rome's joy, beauty and fun. However, perhaps the essence of a 'Roman Holiday' is encapsulated best in the small note I found in the back of the two volumes of Hare's 'Walks in Rome' from the previous owner: 'we had happy times.'