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Fall has arrived and there’s no better time to be in Rome! The crisp air and the golden light of Rome of this season have inspired many writers to wax eloquently upon the beauty of the Eternal City. Visiting Rome in the nineteenth century, the American writer Henry James extolled the extraordinary quality of Rome’s atmosphere in Italian Days:

The aesthetic is so intense that you feel you should live on the taste of it, should extract the nutritive essence of the atmosphere. For positively it’s such an atmosphere! The weather is perfect, the sky as blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the whole air glowing and throbbing with lovely color….

Of course, Henry James is just one of many American and British writers who found their muse in Rome. For centuries, writers and travelers have been coming to the Eternal City to admire its layers of history, to revel in the romance of its ruins, and to soothe their souls as they traverse the layers of time.

Here at e-Cool, we’re a bit bookish, and so we’ve decided to indulge our passion by pursuing a Text & the Eternal City theme over the course of the next week. We’ll be focusing our posts on writers and their literary achievements, and we hope that you’ll find these posts (and the books they introduce) a way to enjoy Rome even if you’re not here at the moment. We’ll aim to discuss literature inspired by the Eterna, past and present, and to pay homage to sites associated with Rome’s literary heritage.

Today, we begin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period in which English-speaking tourists flooded Rome as part of the Grand Tour phenomena. Among the city’s visitors were writers like Lord Byron. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, who sought to convey the experience of the Eternal City in travel journals, poetry, and fiction.

The British Romantic Poet, Lord Byron, started a fad in the early nineteenth century when he described a nocturnal foray into the Colosseum. In his poem, Manfred, Byron penned a celebrated description of the Roman arena as seen under a brightly-lit moon. From this point on, nighttime visits to the Colosseum became de rigeur for nineteenth-century travelers, many of whom had committed Byron’s lines to memory:

When I was wandering, – upon such a night
I stood within the Coliseum’s wall,
Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome!
The trees which grew along the broken arches
Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars
Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar
The watchdog bay’d beyond the Tiber; and
More near from out the Caesars’ palace came
The owl’s long cry…
Ivy usurps the laurel’s place of growth;-
But the gladiators’ bloody Circus stands,
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection!

Byron’s praise for the Colosseum became part of the myth of Rome. The experience of visiting the arena at night was repeatedly incorporated into Rome’s literary tradition. Most famous of late night visitors to the Colosseum is probably Daisy Miller, a character penned by Henry James in his story of the same name. A spunky and impetuous American girl who refused to conform to European social conventions or to listen to practical advice, Daisy risked all to experience the romance and mystique of the Colosseum at night. Her midnight rendezvous with the colossal ruin cost her life, for in the arena she contracted Roman Fever. She died shortly thereafter and James laid his fictional character to rest in Rome’s idyllic Protestant Cemetery.