Anthony Doerr has received many awards -- from the New York
Public Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
American Library Association. Then came the Rome Prize, one
of the most prestigious awards from the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, and with it a stipend and a writing studio
in Rome for a year. Doerr learned of the award the day he
and his wife returned from the hospital with newborn twins. Exquisitely observed, Four Seasons in Rome describes Doerr's
varied adventures in one of the most enchanting cities in
the world. He reads Pliny, Dante, and Keats -- the
chroniclers of Rome who came before him -- and visits the
piazzas, temples, and ancient cisterns they describe. He
attends the vigil of a dying Pope John Paul II and takes his
twins to the Pantheon in December to wait for snow to fall
through the oculus. He and his family are embraced by the
butchers, grocers, and bakers of the neighborhood, whose
clamor of stories and idiosyncratic child-rearing advice is
as compelling as the city itself. This intimate and revelatory book is a celebration of Rome,
a wondrous look at new parenthood, and a fascinating story
of a writer's craft -- the process by which he transforms
what he sees and experiences into sentences.
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