Image via WikiMedia Commons: photo by Diliff, edited by Vassil

But who shall analyze even the simplest Roman impression? It is compounded of so many things, it says so much, it involves so much, it so quickens the intelligence and so flatters the heart, that before we fairly grasp the case the imagination has marked it for her own and exposed us to a perilous likelihood of talking nonsense about it.
—Henry James, Italian Hours (1909)

Here Christ appeared to his fleeing Vicar; here Peter was crucified; here Paul beheaded; here Lawrence burned.
—Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Librum Libri (ca. 1350)

When Eleanor Clark was sixteen, waiting for an admissions letter from Vassar, she spent a “head-over-heels” year in Rome. Her love affair with the enigmatic city grew even deeper when, as a grown woman in 1947, she went back on a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a novel. But Rome was too distracting. In an interview with the book critic John Barkham, Clark remarked, speaking generally about the modern world, “One lives under a variety of shocks and stresses: it is hard for the novelist to compete with what is going on around him.” How devastating, then, Rome must have been with its “impossible compounding of time, in which no century has respect for any other and all hit you in a jumble at every turn,” as she would write.

Clark’s Rome is terrifying to the “foggy modern eye.” To encounter this city, which contains the