Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties

Pennell arrived in Rome in the 1880s with little money, a tricycle, and an appetite for beauty. What followed was a decade of wandering through the capitals of Europe, chronicling the last gasp of the aesthetic movement and the first tremors of the violent nineties. She writes with wry humor about getting detained by police for cycling through Rome's streets, wandering lost through the Ghetto, and navigating the glittering, exhausting world of artists, writers, and poseurs who made up the international colony. This is memoir as portrait of a vanished world: the cafés of Venice where young men still recited poetry, the studios of London where the Pre-Raphaelites were becoming institutions, the shadow of the guillotine falling across Paris. Pennell is sharp-eyed and unsentimental about her own struggles, yet nostalgic for a moment when being an artist meant something radical. The book captures a specific kind of freedom: the freedom to be poor, obscure, and entirely devoted to making beauty in cities that still welcomed dreamers.