“It has been more than fifty years since I came to Rome, for the first time in 1950, with a group of students whose chaplain took an audience with the pope, the year declared holy. In 1952, I lived a whole year in Rome, and since then, there is not a year that I didn’t come back once or several times.
Has Rome changed in half a century? It is the author that has changed. In 1950, I saw, like all human beings, only what I was, without my knowledge, programmed to see. But most of Rome’s beauties, I didn’t see, because they weren’t part of what I was taught to admire. If I crossed the Piazza Navona, I had pleasure in looking at the undulating facade of the church and hearing the murmur of the fountains, but without taking seriously what seemed to me to be nothing but a free fantasy, “amusing” without realizing that Bernini and Borromini had revolutionized art, without understanding that I was dealing with a new language that enables me to free myself more quickly from the Jansenist and puritan morals that have shaped me.

The chapter diversity ( The Ancient Wolrd, Domus Aurea, Villa Hadriana, Palace, villa and garden, church, San Clemente, Saint-Pierre and the Vatican, Caravage route, Bernin route, Collines, Le Tibre, Fountains, and Bestiaire) draws the contours of the personal Rome of Dominique Fernandez who thus pay tribute to this city that helped to shape the writer that he became. Illustrated by sublime pictures of Ferrante Ferranti, this book reveals all the unknown aspects of the “Eternal City” and especially, renews the look of every reader curious to discover it.

This book was published in its first bonded version in 2004, after several reprints more than 7,000 copies were sold. It is released here in a softback version at a very affordable price of 29 euros. It should reach a large audience because there are no beautiful books with this quality about Rome, a city that attracts hundreds of French people each year.

Novelist and essayist, he wrote Dans la main de l’ange (Prix Goncourt) and de Porporino ou les mystères de Naples (Prix Médicis), Dominique Fernandez, with Ferrante Ferranti published several beautiful books after its numerous travel: Saint Petersburg, Palermo and Sicily, Bolivia, Prague, Sevilla, Syria, Villa Medicis…