City of the Soul

Taking readers into the heart of Rome in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this is the story of the remarkable expatriate writers and artists who transformed the city into a profound cultural and social mecca.

City of the Soul takes the reader to the heart of Rome in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This story evokes the Rome of a one hundred-year period, a busy American colony full of clubs, societies, pensiones, cafés, restaurants, and libraries. It traces the intersecting lives—creative and personal—of these remarkable men and women, showing how their love of Keats turned Rome into a profound cultural and social mecca.

This is the Rome of Edith Wharton, Henry James, Axel Munthe, Elihu Vedder, William Wetmore Story, Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joaquin Miller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Franz Liszt, Margaret Fuller, George Inness, Augustus St Gaudens, and Oscar Wilde.

For all of them, Rome was inextricably entwined with the memory of John Keats, the young English poet who died in 1821 in a small room beside the Spanish Steps and the Piazza di Spagna. And they were attracted to Rome in part by the knowledge that he ended his days there.

It begins with Keats's death and concludes a century later with F. Scott Fitzgerald completing The Great Gatsby a few minutes’ walk from the house where Keats died. Between those events, it traces the lives of some of the greatest artists and writers of the fin de siècle, showing how they were shaped and affected by a love of poetry.