"Eternal City, Sawdust Caesar": Americans on Tour in Post-Wwii Rome (1944-1960) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Fascism and the Second World War received considerable attention in American travel writing about Rome during the late 1940s and the 1950s. The years in question marked the beginning of a truly mass tourism in Rome and saw an unprecedented number of Americans come to Italy, bringing with them a vision of themselves, the world, and of overseas travel influenced by the conflict just ended and by the emerging bi-polar dynamics of the Cold War. The literature produced by and/or for them reveals a not unfamiliar tension between the pull of an iconic Rome and the desire to make the city into a lesson regarding the contemporary world. I say purposefully "not unfamiliar" because for centuries Rome had offered visiting writers and visual artists a remarkably fluid metaphor upon which to map the anxieties of their age (Black 142-65; Chard 40-74; Buzard, The Beaten Track 217-27, 285-330; Melton 206-10; Luzzi 49-58; Edwards 1-17). Among these, Americans had a particularly complex relationship with the Eternal City, both as idea and as physical place. According to William Vance, they had been drawn to Rome since the mid-18th century because it offered them "the greatest challenge and some of the most precious gifts" for contemplating their own national identity (xvi). Like their northern European counterparts, Americans considered Rome the birthplace of their cultural and political traditions. They likewise shared a tendency to view the Roman Empire's decline as the great cautionary tale of history: the perceived decadence of contemporary Roman society offered them a titillating and satisfying confirmation of their own superiority, and thus of their rightful place as heirs of the Roman Republic. However, Americans' relationship with the city was long complicated by their simultaneous need to distance themselves from the old world and desire for direct contact with the culture and antiquity so abundantly tangible in Rome, and so lacking in their own country (Vance 1: xx, 2-10 ; Melton 208-20; Amfitheatrof 3-10). Post-war American visitors to Rome, of course, shared some of these characteristics with their forbears, and their writing and touring were demonstrably shaped by the vast library of travel literature that preceded them. Nonetheless, their receptions of the Eternal City were also bound up with what were essentially new ways of conceiving of themselves and their relationship with Europe as a whole. Fascism, the war, and reconstruction had each contributed to narratives about an American "rescue" of the Old World, while the Cold War added urgency to the idea that the rebuilding of Western Europe should be done in