The Spirit of Rome

Vernon Lee returned to Rome after decades away, and what she found there was herself. Walking through villas and the Vatican, standing in the hollow silence of the Pantheon, she discovers that the city has been waiting inside her all along, a place where the ghosts of lost friends and former lovers haunt every archway, where the woman she was at seventeen still wanders alongside the woman she has become. This is not a guidebook. It is a diary of excavations: of ruins, yes, but more movingly, of the self. Lee writes with the eye of an art historian who sees the Renaissance breathing in every corner, and with the soul of someone who understands that to return to a city of your childhood is to time travel without leaving the present. The Spirit of Rome captures something rare, the particular grief and wonder of finding that a place holds your memories even when you have been away, even when you thought you had forgotten.