Rome, the Eternal City, has ever been a romantic and dramatic subject for authors throughout history. Here, well-known author Elizabeth Bowen turns her own particular eye upon the city, after spending three months there, and after a lifetime of visits that began in the 1920s (the book was first published in 1959). The book ends up with a personal tone that highlights the landscape, the history, individual personalities, and the quiet joys of walking through the warmly lit layers of a city. Bowen arrives in Rome, alone, after a sleepy railway journey from Paris. Soon, she is strolling through the Augustan Forum and along the great walls of the city. While there is a guide-book cadence to these passages, Bowen warns the reader that the book should be taken more as the notes in the margins of her own guide book, rather than any sequential guide itself. Still, you might not have much trouble getting around the Forum with just this book in hand. Bowen has her own meditative mind to follow, though, and is soon ruminating on the lives of various Ceasars and the effects they had on the city. She dismisses the Middle Ages as empty (probably not a thought commonly held today), and lands in the Renaissance, elevating the changes that wiped out much of medieval Rome. Finally, painting a portrait of the character of Roman citizenship, she looks back on the journey of Saint Paul, from Jerusalem to Rome, pursuing his Roman right of appeal to the highest authority in the land, Ceasar himself. Bowen expresses a kind of lonely affection for the city. The book is peopled by history and her imagination, rather than the people she encountered along the way. She even somewhat apologizes for this in the closing pages of the book. Yet there is a wandering character to the book that is warm and engaging. Bowen is a flâneuse, a woman given to enjoying a long meandering walk through a great city.