Consuming the View: Tourism, Rome, And the Topos of the Eternal City (Essay‪)‬

Introduction In a short story by Luigi Malerba titled "Consuming the View," the narrator laments that the view of Rome has suddenly gone out of focus. Standing atop the Janiculum hill, the panorama keeps getting blurrier as the days go by. Romans rush out to get their eyes checked. Special experts, or "panoramologists," are called in to analyze the situation. In all, we discover that the all-consuming gaze of tourists is slowly wearing away the view of Rome (3-8).