Customer Reviews

The Smiles of Rome: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers

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This book puts the enigmatic charm of Rome into words. There are also some useful suggestions for restaurants and sites to see. This book would be most useful to someone that has been there before and would be able to identify with the experiences and places described. Perfect for just before a visit, or just to remind yourself of what it was like to be there.

I'm on my way to visit Rome once again and chanced across this book. While I haven't finished it yet, what I've read is absolutely marvelous. Her choices of writers include some many well know authors (Hawthorne, Freud, Ovid, whom I'd never read before and was astounded by his "The Art of Love".) The characters written about come alive. If you have been to Rome before and are going again, the next trip will be more meaningful for you. I can't wait to leave next week and plan to take the book with me to refresh my memory. Highly recommended.

Though The Smiles of Rome is one of those books that are classically recommended to travelers to Italy, especially first-time travelers, it struck me as a colossal bore. What becomes obvious is that Cahill made her selections less on literary merit and more on their ability to lend themselves to an itinerary or the frequency with which they mentioned churches, bridges, museums, or other monuments that Cahill wanted to highlight. The result is that the writing is extremely uneven when it isn't utterly obscure (Freud's essay on the Moses of Michelangelo is just plain odd, while Browning's and Vittoria Colonna's poetry, along with Michelangelo's sonnets, is just plain dull). Other selections are eccentric and bad-fitting (excerpts from Morante's History, a few of Peter's Letters to the Romans, and a strange little interview with Fellini about La Dolce Vita are examples of pieces whose unease in this context is palpable), giving the sense of having been smacked into place with blows of a hammer rather than gentled into the book because of their beauty or appropriateness. Eleanor Clark's piece on the Protestant Cemetery is readable only because its subject matter is so interesting, though the truth of the matter is that her baffling thickets of clauses and qualifiers are utterly maddening; Updike's contribution is a genuine nullity, though he is far from the only writer to be included here for his name rather than for the quality or intrinsic interest of the writing that Cahill anthologizes. As a practical matter, The Smiles of Rome was published more than four years ago and its advice about restaurants or museum hours is no longer useful; browse the book in the library for the walking tours at the end of each chapter or cadge its bibliography, but spend your money on another book about Rome.