Rome

In Rome, the past never quite stays in the past. Residents and visitors alike are faced at every turn with some monument to millennia of complex history—most often right next to the latest fad in tourist-trap technology. “You could say it’s a place where time stands still,” writes Eleonora Marangoni, “but that wouldn’t be accurate. In a certain sense, time doesn’t exist here.”

Caught between a classical Roman youth—days passed in reverie among friends, nights spent sneaking into forbidden places—and the nostalgia of an adult who’s moved away and then returned, Marangoni surveys each of the seven hills that make up the heart of Rome, from the Aventine to the Esquiline. Mixing urban history, cultural touchstones, family anecdotes, and overheard conversations, she shows a place that absorbs, seduces, and refuses to ever fully change.

Written with precision but also irony, with evident love and hopeless devotion but a bracing absence of sentimentality, Rome is a series of interwoven stories about a city at once magnificent and unstable, fatalistic and lusty, urgently contemporary and, yes, timeless.