Writing Rome: The Romance of Ruins

For centuries 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.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British and American writers were among the tourists who flooded Rome. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, and many others sought to convey the experience of Rome 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 Non-Catholic Cemetery.

Read Daisy Miller! Buy a copy from the iDC City Bookshop!