A collection of essays on Uwe Timm’s experience of Rome, this city full of history and utopias, where he used to live for some time.
For him this was the city of old dreams, vaguely connected to the taste of his first orange after the war, later with the socialist dreams of Gramsci. His stay there turned into a tough reality check though: he had to cope with a cold flat in a Roman winter, and the everyday bureaucratic jungle and murderous anarchy of traffic. In these at the same time personal and historical reflections, the foreign surroundings become nevertheless a place of magic and a challenge to becoming aware of one’s own historic and literary position.
