ROME - a marriage of smoke and mirrors

This post is now on our new website.

Noir Novels: ROME

"see a location through an author's eyes"

Two noir novels set in Rome, with colour co-ordinated covers! (Are cerulean blue and 50 shades of grey the workaday colours of the noir genre, we wonder?) Dark, dark city, murder, back alleys, sinister characters - these all feature in abundance, taking you to the places in Rome that as tourists we are (happily) unlikely to encounter.






 Any Human Face by Charles Lambert is set in the bleaker backwaters of Rome, on the edges of the gay community, each chapter like a snapshot in black and white. The Leitmotiv throughout the novel is a collection of photographs of convicts, which passes from one hand to another and eventually ends up in the possession of Andrew Caruso, who runs a delapidated book shop La Piccola Libreria, in the city. Moving between the 1980s and 2008, the photographic quality of the chapters serves to highlight the intrinsic isolation of many of the colourful characters who breeze in and out of the storyline, all the while set against a lurking presence of menace. The storyline and characters sometimes have a Pasolini-like quality, which really anchors the novel in the Eternal City.

And from this book we discovered  the restaurant “L'obitorio" un classico di Trastevere which serves pizza "piu' buona di Roma” - Bruno and Alex drop in early on in the book. Has anyone been there, what did you think?


"Even today, after two years of Roman vacations, I get lost in the center of the city as soon as I leave the perpendicular line of the Corso. For someone accustomed to the perfect symmetry of Manhattan, the twisting streets of the Italian capital seem a labyrinth of squares and narrow alleys, all the same: a fountain, a column, a flaking wall, a café, a market stall, a wild dog, a motorcycle, a beggar, a group of American or Japanese tourists, another fountain" (extract from Roman Holidays, Rome Noir short story, by Enrico Franceschini).

Recognise Rome from this short description? The lovely indecipherable impenetrable city with a history going back two and a half thousand years; and this is just one of many descriptions that pepper the book of short stories Rome Noir edited by Chiara Stangalino and Maxim Jakubowski. A cocktail of 16 stories set around the capital from Stazione Termini to the Via Appia Antica, Fiumicino to the Villa Borghese. Some stories are like gossamer veils enveloping and captivating, some are downright dark, and others culminate in murderous intent. Others are visceral in their storyline, some are seamy, but there is something for everyone. Tour the city through this collection and get to know areas off the beaten tourist track and experience the stories through the eyes of its citizens.

Share your choice of Rome set noir novels with us below in the Comments Box - novels that bring a place to life  (oh, and any suggestions for any good, out-of-the-way eateries?).

When in Rome.....

"Even today, after two years of Roman vacations, I get lost in the center of the city as soon as I leave the perpendicular line of the Corso.  For someone accustomed to the perfect symmetry of Manhattan, the twisting streets of the Italian capital seem a labyrinth of squares and narrow alleys, all the same: a fountain, a column, a flaking wall, a café, a market stall, a wild dog, a motorcycle, a beggar, a group of American or Japanese tourists, another fountain" (extract from Roman Holidays, a Rome Noir short story, by Enrico Franceschini).

Recognise Rome from this short description? The lovely indecipherable impenetrable city with a history going back two and a half thousand years; and this is just one of many descriptions that pepper the book of short stories "Rome Noir" edited by Chiara Stangalino and Maxim Jakubowski. A cocktail of 16 stories set around the capital from Stazione Termini to the Via Appia Antica, Fiumicino to the Villa Borghese. Some stories are like gossamer veils enveloping and captivating, some are downright dark, and others culminate in murderous intent. Others are visceral in their storyline, some are seamy, but there is something for everyone. Tour the city through this collection and get to know areas off the beaten tourist track and experience the stories through the eyes of its citizens.

Off for a Chinotto*. Cheers

Want a couple more books novels to transport you to Rome? Then we suggest these two little gems:

Saving Rome by Megan Williams: Amid the bustle of Rome, the Vespas and the Fiats, the cigarettes and teetering high heals, Megan K Williams, a Rome-based writer and correspondent, captures the essence of this bustling city. This is an insider's eye on the love, mystery and unholy chaos of Rome. In nine funny and insightful stories, Williams delves into the lives of women searching for meaning (and survival) in an ancient metropolis.


It's 2005. The Italian secret service has received news that a group of Muslim immigrants based in the Viale Marconi neighbourhood of Rome is planning a terrorist attack. Christian Mazzari, a young Sicilian who speaks perfect Arabic, goes undercover to infiltrate the group and to learn who its leaders are. Breathtaking set pieces, episodes rich in pathos, brilliant dialogue and mordant folk proverbs combine as the novel moves towards an unforgettable and surprising finale that will have readers turning back to the first page to begin the ride all over again.



* Chinotto [kiˈnɔtto] is a type of carbonated soft drink produced from the juice of the fruit of the myrtle-leaved orange tree (Citrus myrtifolia).

We have a selection of novels for review on the TripFiction site. Click on the logo above to see our current offers and let us know which one you would like to review! And of course, if you have a particular recommendation for a book to read in Rome, then let all our readers know in the Comments Box below.

A couple of novel suggestions for ROME

We are taking you on a journey to Rome this week, via some wonderful fiction. We have chosen just a couple of books that are perhaps less well known than some of the more obvious choices like: 

•  Eat, Pray, Love http://www.tripfiction.com/Book/196
•  I, Claudius http://www.tripfiction.com/Book/484 
• Angels and Demons http://www.tripfiction.com/Book/1429

or the novels by Steven Saylor or Iain Pears, for example. For us these two iconic novels just capture the feel of the Eternal City from two very unusual perspectives. There are lots more books that will evoke Rome through their pages at www.TripFiction.com -  just pay us a visit!

"see a location through an author's eyes"

"This is not really like anything else I have read (the Road, perhaps?). One single sentence guides you through just over 100 pages from beginning to end. 1943, a young pregnant woman mulls over her situation, the situation of the world, and her place in Rome, and Rome's place in the world, in a stream of consciousness. I read it in a couple of hours and was bowled over." http://www.tripfiction.com/Book/2248

A small, culturally mixed community living in an apartment building in the centre of Rome is thrown into disarray when one of the neighbours is murdered. As each of the victim's neighbours is questioned, the reader is offered an all-access pass into the most colourful neighbourhood in contemporary Rome. Each character recounts his or her story - revealing the dramas of emigration, immigration, and the fears and misunderstandings of a life spent on society's margins, abused by mainstream culture's fears, preconceptions and insensitivities. (and isn't the title just wonderfully quirky?) http://www.tripfiction.com/Book/178

Please help us the build this site into a really valuable resource for travellers: you can do this by buying your books through our site, as we get a small commission from every sale with no cost to the purchaser (if you buy a Maserati through our site, for example, that would help us greatly!); come and write reviews and, of course, suggest more titles to add to the over 2000 titles. It's a great way to get to know a destination in such a unique way.

A novel set in Nemi near Rome

Ok, you are going to have to trawl the secondhand bookshops for a copy of this book... but it is absolutely wonderful to sit on a terrace cafe, overlooking the Lake at Nemi, eating some tarts, little wild strawberries snuggled in a crème patissière; perhaps even a glass of prosecco to hand. Put your feet up and read this book set here. Take yourself into the past and imagine Caligula playing warship games on the Lake (he would of course have called it Nemorensis Lacus), many sunken Roman warships atest to his activities. Take yourself to the villas that feature in this novel and imagine life as it was.....


And on the first Sunday in June every year they have a strawberry festival. As they say in Italian La sagra delle fragole a Nemi è un appuntamento imperdibile  Or, The Strawberry Festival at Nemi is an appointment not to be missed http://www.tripfiction.com/Book/371

A dip into the Eternal City

Iain Pears does for Rome what Donna Leon does for Venice. Here is a small extract that just perfectly captures that quintessential "eternity" of Rome...(Click on the cover for more information)

"It is one of the great delights of Rome that not even a long-term, assiduous resident is safe from surprise. Any street in the city, no matter where and no matter how seedy or shabby it looks at first glance, is capable of containing some little gem tucked away in an obscure corner, passed by nearly all the time and waiting to astonish. Sometimes it is a toy-box-sized Renaissance chapel, around which a twentieth-century developer has squeezed a vast, lumbering block of flats, or which has been accidentally turned into a traffic roundabout. Or the remains of a Roman palace nestling between a truck stop  and a railway line. Or it is a Renaissance pile, converted into flats and hammered incessantly by fumes and noise of traffic, but which still has its delicate, colonnaded courtyard, with moss on the cobbles and a sculpted fountain of nymphs and goddesses tinkling away to welcome home the weary commuters in the evening."

Want to delve in a bit more into Rome? Our collection of books set in Rome can be found here