Venice's thousand-year history unfolds through naval conflict and political intrigue, with the city's beauty inseparable from its ambitions and reversals.
A changed room in a Florence hotel unsettles Lucy Honeychurch's expectations, beginning an encounter with love that challenges her inherited prejudices.
Elizabeth Bowen's account of a time spent in Rome is no ordinary guidebook but an evocation of a city - its history, its architecture and, above all, its atmosphere.
Florence becomes the setting for Lawrence's exploration of unstable convictions, as impulse and fractured moral assumptions unsettle the direction of a life.
American artists and writers encounter Rome across two centuries, revealing how the city helped shape their creative imaginations and cultural ambitions.
Tucci's family saga carries readers into turn-of-the-century Rome, where differences of class and circumstance shape the intimate texture of city life.
Duggan imagines Rome's beginnings through historical fiction, giving the city's foundational story the human stakes of an uncertain and contested world.
Dante's imagined journey through the afterlife underlies the reading in The Dante Game, connecting a Florentine mystery with medieval Italy's great poem.
Enzensberger looks across six European countries, bringing Italy into an essayist's exploration of a continent's conflicting identities and assumptions.
