Fleeting Rome: In Search of la Dolce Vita.(Book review)

Historian, The, March, 2006 by Ford, Charles H.

Fleeting Rome: In Search of la Dolce Vita. By Carlo Levi. (Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2004. Pp. xxxvii, 280. $24.95.)

Gigliola De Donato, Luisa Montevecchi, and Giulio Ferroni have rescued some of the most insightful and entertaining writings of the famous Italian intellectual Carlo Levi from archival obscurity with their well-organized anthology, Fleeting Rome: In Search of la Dolce Vita. Levi is best known for his novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli, published in 1945, but these thirty-three short essays were written in the two decades after that success. After World War II, Rome was changing into a standard modern city, losing its familiar charms, eccentrics, and traditions. Placed in chronological order, Levi's fragments read like a nostalgic...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.