Rome
Rome in the nineteenth century was a required stop for American and English writers, and the novels they wrote about it are usually about their own innocence. Hawthorne's The Marble Faun turns on a crime committed in the city; James's Daisy Miller ends in the Protestant Cemetery, where Keats had been buried seventy years earlier.
The national library holds the printed record of the city as a capital and as a papal state, including guidebooks, maps and periodicals. For readers following a character through the streets, a nineteenth-century guidebook is often more useful than a modern one, because it describes the city the author expected you to know.
A library to check
- Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma — catalogues and digital collections, open to readers online
Books connected to Rome
- The Marble Faun — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1860. Hawthorne's Italian novel: slow, odd, and more interested in guilt than in plot.
- Roderick Hudson — Henry James, 1875. An early James novel that already knows how to make failure interesting.
- Daisy Miller — Henry James, 1878. Short, sharp and still capable of starting an argument about who was actually at fault.
A note on accuracy
We describe literary connections and public collections, not street addresses, opening hours or ticket prices. Those change and we cannot verify them for every reader. Follow the institution's own site for current visiting information.