Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
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36 Dickens, Pictures from Italy,122.
37 In Rome and a Villa, Eleanor Clark quotes an early-twentieth-century architect who said much the same thing: “You see, the earlier you go, the better the workmanship.”
38 Tacitus, Tacitus on Britain and Germany, trans. H. Mattingly (New York: Penguin Classics, 1948), 52.
39 Trevor Norton, Underwater to Get out of the Rain (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006), 25.
40 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Rackham, bk. 10, chap. 2, 3:293.
41 Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 14, 3:29.
42 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Healy, bk. 28, chap. 2, p. 252.
43 http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/ europe/03/06/il.manifesto/.
44 The average Italian family of four, the manufacturer’s website says, consumes eight hundred grams of Nutella a year. That’s 1.7 pounds.
45 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Rackham, bk. 7, chap. 6, 2:535.
46 Ibid., bk. 7, chap. 6, 2:535.
47 Peter Pesic, Sky in a Bottle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 26.
48 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Roman Elegies I.”
49 Even though their apartments are air-conditioned now, it is good for the cardinals that John Paul II did not die in August. In 1623, eight cardinals and forty of their assistants died of malaria during a sweltering nineteen-day conclave.
50 Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Italia, 2000), 335.
51 Berlusconi’s was indeed the longest in postwar Italy. In May 2006, after five years in power, and weeks of controversy, he finally conceded defeat in parliamentary elections. “They will miss me,” he reportedly told his ministers before handing in his resignation.
52 Clark, Rome and a Villa, 314.
53 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Rackham, bk. 9, chap. 17, 3:195.
54 Clark, Rome and a Villa, 93.
55 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Healy, bk. 37, p. 376.
56 Tom Andrews, “North of the Future,” in Random Symmetries (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2002), 264.
57 Henry James, Italian Hours (New York: Penguin Classics, 1995), 134.
58 Clark, Rome and a Villa, xviii.
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to Rosecrans Baldwin and The Morning News (www.themorningnews.org) for conceiving, improving, and publishing my letters from Rome; to Becky Kraemer at Melville House Publishing, who convinced me my notebooks might be worth transforming into a book; to Laura Gratz-Piasecki and her family; to Steve and Jennifer Heuser; to Cristiano Urbani; to Sarah Kuehl and Ben Trautman for the help, friendship, and table; to all the fellows, especially Lisa Williams and George Stoll; to Azar Nafisi; to Lester Little and Lella Gandini, who presided over the Academy with singular grace; to Tacy, for everything; to my parents and brothers; to Hal and Jacque Eastman; to the incomparable Dana Prescott; to Lorenzo, Norm, G.P., and Pina; to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome for giving writers such a breathtaking gift; to the Oberlin College Press for allowing me to reprint a few lines by Tom Andrews; to Emily Forland and Emma Patterson; to Anna deVries; to Clare Reihill for her warmth; to Nan Graham for her continued faith and confidence; to Wendy Weil for always understanding; and finally, of course, to Shauna, without whom the world is not the world, and Rome cannot be Rome.
If I got things wrong in here, and I’m sure I did, the fault is wholly my own.
About the Author
ANTHONY DOERR is the bestselling and prizewinning author of All the Light We Cannot See, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Shell Collector, About Grace and Memory Wall. In 2007 Granta named him as one of their 21 Best Young American Novelists and in 2011 he won the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.
Also by Anthony Doerr
All the Light We Cannot See
Memory Wall
About Grace
The Shell Collector
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