The Henry James Evening Literary Walk

“When at dusk the lanterns in the palace courtyards start glimmering and the church bells intoning those solemn, muffled notes that speak as though from the depths of the ocean, when the baroque folds of washing cease dripping over the narrow streets and the motor-tricycle drays, their parasols no longer sheltering mountains of violets and carnations but a stalk or two of either, snort their empty way homeward, when the smell of bleach and coffee gives place to that of fruit-rind and roasted chestnuts – that is the magical moment to wander about Rome. That is the moment to see the city of conflicting moods as it always has been and still is, hateful and holy, wicked and wise, pagan and papal, sometimes so beautiful that it is scarcely to be endured, and always quite inscrutable. That is the supreme moment to rhapsodize and pay homage, to make final assault upon the hidden secret of Rome’s eternal decay, and to be deliciously deceived.”

Written in the early 1950s by the great English architectural historian, James Lees-Milne, these words, no less true today, serve as a fitting introduction to our private evening literary walk – a jaunt focusing on the sense of the eternal city as felt by writers and poets. This vibe is no less intense today than it was in the nineteenth century, when it was felt by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Dickens, John Keats and Percy Bysse Shelley, Byron, James Fenimore Cooper, Goethe, Stendhal, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and, perhaps most notably, Harvard-trained Henry James.

For James, the cultured, ‘Europeanized’ American became a great source of interest and concern, whom he anatomized in his fiction as both a prime actor and a victim. No less true today, Rome is a mixture of light and darkness, where there exists the possibility of travelers and ex-patriots turning into something they are not, where there lurks the hazard of becoming unmoored from their history and character. In James’ books, just as she was in antiquity as the goddess ‘Roma,’ Rome is a personality capable of the most variegated and subtle expressions, and capable of beguiling unwary Americans . . . .

Down the Spanish Steps into the fabled Campus Martius, inhaling, as Dickens did, the colorful scent of the various and sundry populace whose faces he claimed to have seen ‘on all the great canvases of Europe,’ our Sunset Wine and Cheese walk covers literary sites of the nineteenth century in a romantic evening setting, such as the house of Keats and Shelly, and of Elizabeth and Robert Barrett Browning. Capitalizing upon that ‘magical moment to wander about Rome,’ the walk is a fine and relaxed way to partake Rome’s staggering and very past cultural greatness within the boundaries of one’s own domestic experience; to experience Rome’s heroic past overlaid by a present rife with suspicion and pleasure seeking; to see the things Rome offers to the eye and the fancy which conspire to melt and mar the soul, and to bewitch oneself with the enervation of ‘too much’ . . . too much magnificence and too much squalor . . . too much beauty and too much degradation. Moreover, it’s a great way to unwind and have a little fun . . . to make the city your own . . . and to sample the wine and hors d’oeuvres of some the old local bars that haven’t changed since Henry James’ day . . . .

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