During its three-thousand-year history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation and the spiritual core of a great world religion. For writers from antiquity to the present, however, the place holds an alternative significance as a realm of fantasy, aspiration and desire. Captivating and lethal at one and the same moment, its fatal gift of beauty both transfigures and betrays those in thrall to it. Rome Stories explores the city's fateful impact through the writing of classical historians, a Renaissance sculptor, 18th-century tourists, American, British and French novelists and the authors of modern Rome, each testing and unravelling the city's ageless paradoxes. Gibbon admires the Last of the Tribunes, Goethe decodes the mysteries of the Carnival and Stendhal's subversive aristocrats mingle revolution with a little cross-dressing amid their gilt mirrors and frescoed ceilings From Plutarch to Pasolini, from Hawthorne to Wharton, the city of Caesars and popes, of dreamers, chancers and hustlers confronts the questing imagination with its eternally unflinching gaze.

EDITOR BIOGRAPHY
Jonathan Keates has written extensively about Italy. He has also published acclaimed biographies of Handel, Purcell and Stendhal, and his fiction includes the short story collection Allegro Postillions (winner of both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize) and the novel The Strangers' Gallery set in 19th-century Italy. He is Chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund and for thirty-nine years taught English at the City of London School.