A Time in Rome, by Elizabeth Bowen

Reviewed by Julie Falkner

Born in Dublin in 1899, Elizabeth Bowen moved in elite literary circles and is perhaps best known for her novel “The Death of the Heart”. In “A Time in Rome”, first published in 1960, she describes with a novelist’s touch her experience of a season spent in the Eternal City. The result is most emphatically not a guidebook – the potential tourist should look elsewhere – but rather an atmospheric meditation in which she shares her “loverlike ambiguous taste for Rome”.

Be warned that the book takes some getting into, but perseverance is rewarded with an intriguing collection of observations on architecture and history. Anyone who has walked through the Forum pondering its lost ancient wonders will be moved by Bowen’s description: “Dregs of echoes have seeped down into the cracks in the sunken pavements; the ripple of excavations up the long valley is glacier-still, now and for evermore. The glare from above, so annulling elsewhere, falls here on nothing it can annul: rather, it gives void porticoes, unequal columns, sagging ascents of steps additional hardness, which becomes them.”

Elsewhere Bowen considers the effects of Roman reclining on the digestive system, and evokes life in ancient Rome after dark, when the wagons and chariots prohibited during the day would be unleashed on a city attempting to sleep. She is equally marvellous when imagining the duty of a Vestal Virgin, painting a vivid picture of a young woman struggling to stave off unconsciousness while “hypnotized by the flame’s flutter” and listening to the furtive night-time noises of an insomniac metropolis.

Much more than mere “scribblings on the margins” of a guidebook, Bowen’s reflections on Rome are both erudite and idiosyncratic. Now available to a wider audience in this Vintage Classics edition, they will awaken a new appreciation of an eternally fascinating city.

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A Time in Rome, by Elizabeth Bowen