Mapped
History: A Novel
Elsa Morante
In wartime and postwar Rome, Ida Ramundo, a timid half-Jewish widowed schoolteacher, is raped by a young German soldier and bears a son, Useppe, and mother and child struggle to survive through bombing, deportation, hunger and the black market as 'History' grinds the powerless underfoot. Morante's great anti-war novel maps a real Rome: the poor quarter of San Lorenzo and its bombing, the Jewish Ghetto and its deportation, the refugee shelters, and the ravaged city where innocence cannot last.
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History (La Storia)
Elsa Morante
Morante's wartime and post-war Rome, from 1941 to 1947, seen from the poor quarters rather than the palaces. A half-Jewish schoolteacher and her small son move from the tenements of San Lorenzo through the rubble of the Allied bombing to a shelter on the city's rural edge, past the ghetto emptied in October 1943 and out to Testaccio. The map runs from the San Lorenzo district by the Verano cemetery, southwest to the old Jewish quarter and Testaccio, and northeast to the barracks of Pietralata.
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Memoirs of Hadrian
Marguerite Yourcenar
An ageing emperor writes to his heir, taking the measure of a life spent building. The map holds the monuments Hadrian left standing in Rome: the Pantheon he rebuilt and the great drum of his own mausoleum by the Tiber. It reaches east to his villa at Tibur and, on his memory's longer excursions, to the Athens he adorned and the Nile where Antinous drowned.
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Quo Vadis
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Nero's Rome in 64 AD, and the fire that destroys it. The Palatine palace, the Circus Maximus quarter where the flames begin, the Circus of Nero on the Vatican Field where the Christians are burned, the Mamertine prison, and the Appian Way, where the risen Christ meets Peter fleeing the city. Sienkiewicz built the ancient city from the monuments that still stand, and it brings Rome into the atlas.
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