In the essays on travels in Italy written from 1872 to 1909 (edited in the Penguin Book "Italian Hours"), Henry James explores art and religion, political shifts and cultural revolutions, and the nature of travel itself. Jame's enthusiastic appreciation of the vitality of Rome is everywhere marked by pervasive regret for the disappearance of the past and by ambivalence concerning the transformation of the nineteenth-century Europe.

Rome,
before it fell to the Italian troops on 20 September 1870, remained a world apart for many people. It belonged to the Pope, and, as capital of the Papal states, it continued the tradition of offering tremendous ecclesiastical grandeur and rigid moral pressure. Now, for the first time in centuries, Rome was heaving on its foundations and stretching its limbs.

During our literary walks we will introduce you insightfully to the following sigths by mingling our modern knowledge about them with Jame's impressions dating back to the 19th century.

The tour begins in Piazza Venezia, from which we can take a look at via del Corso. "The Corso was always a well-filled street, but now it's a perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder where the new-comers are lodged...". Here you will be entertained by the story of the famous Roman Carnival: "early in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the moccoletti (pieces of candles)...". The huge Victor Emmanuel Monument has totally changed the aspect of the square.

Our next step is in the valley of the Roman Forum, the centre of political, commercial and judicial life in Ancient Rome. In James' time there still existed palaces (later destroyed) among the ruins: "there are prodigious strangenesses in the union of this airy and comparatively fresh-faced superstructure and these deep-plunging, hoary foundantions".

The Colosseum
Rome's great amphitheatre was commissioned by the Emperor Vespasian in AD 72 on the marshy site of a lake in the grounds of Nero's palace. "One of course never passes the Colosseum without going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing the long oval (...) The upper portions of the side toward the Esquiline look as remote and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you raise your eyes to their rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and silvered by the blue air...".

Before going on our way to the Lateran, we "turn away under the Arch of Constantine, whose noble battered bas-reliefs , with the chain of tragic statues - fettered, drooping barbarians - round its summit".

Church of San Giovanni e Paolo
Through an ancient street called "clivus scaurus" on the slope of the Celian Hill, we reach the church that occupies a site tradionally connected with the house of John and Paul. "The place always seems to me the perfection of an out-of-the-way corner - a place you would think twice before telling people about...". We will visit the recently re-opened House of St John and St Paul. This interesting two-storeyed construction, with 20 rooms, was originally part of three buildings: a roman palace, a Christian house and an oratory, decorated with frescoes of the 2C or the 3C-4C.

Early in the 4th century, the Laterani family were disgraced and their land taken by Emperor Constantine to build Rome's first Christian basilica. Borromini undertook the last major rebuild of the interior in the 1646. The "charm of charms at St. John in Lateran is the admirable twelfth-century cloister", built by Vassalletto family. We will be attracted by its twisted twin columns and inlaid marble mosaics: "The shrubs and flowers about the ancient well were blooming away in the intense light, and the twisted pillars and chiselled capitals of the perfect little colonnade seemed to enclose them like the sculptured rim of a precious vase".

Scala Santa and Sancta Sanctorum
In the east side of Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano, a building houses two surviving parts of the old Lateran Palace. One is the pope's private chapel, the Sancta Sanctorum (Holy of Holies), the other the holy staircase, the Scala Santa. The 28 steps, said to be those that Christ ascended in Pontius Pilate's house during his trial, are supposed to have been brougth from Jerusalem by St Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine. The Sancta Sanctorum, built in 1278, is decorated with fine Cosmatesque marble-work, and contains many important relics, the most precious being an image of Jesus painted by St Luke. "It had to my fancy an Oriental, a Mahometan note. I expected every moment to see a sultana appear in a silver veil and silken trousers and sit down on the crimson carpet".

Santa Maria Maggiore
In 352, Pope Liberius had a dream in which the Virgin told him to build a church on the spot where he found snow. When it fell on the Esquiline, on the morning of 5 August in the middle of a baking Roman summer, he naturally obeyed. Of all the great Roman basilicas, Santa Maria Maggiore has the most succesfull blend of different architectural styles.

Piazza San Pietro, the masterpiece of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, is one of the most superb conceptions of its kind in civic architecture, and is a fitting approach to the world's greatest basilica. You will be enchanted by the magnificent details of the basilica: Filarete Door, Michelangelo's Pietà and dome, the Bernini's Baldacchino and Throne of St Peter in Glory, the monument to Pope Alexander the VII and much more.

 External Links about Henry James:

  http://web.bham.ac.uk/doveral/james/   "The official Henry James Web-Site"
  http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/henry_james_review/   Henry James Review