Amore
An American Father's Roman Holiday
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- ¥1,400
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- ¥1,400
発行者による作品情報
As his twin daughters approached adolescence, sociologist Roger Friedland was worried. The thing that most bothered him was not the erotic heat of America’s youth culture, but the lovelessness of its sex. Offered the chance to live and teach in Rome, Roger and his wife, Debra, seized the opportunity to take their family to live in a city where love is alive, family bonds hold, divorce and rape are rare, and “ciao, bella” is a constant refrain.
In Amore, Friedland shares the stories of his family’s enchanted and unnerving passage into the heart of Rome, and considers its lessons for America, where love is at risk.
Amore is a love story, a father’s exploration of the ways of life and love in Rome, and what they have to teach us about the erosion of romance in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Friedland, a professor of cultural sociology and religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, covers a lot of ground, literally and figuratively, in this memoir about raising twin daughters in Rome, the city founded by the mythical twin boys Romulus and Remus. Rather than allow his middle-school aged girls (born in California in 1992 after nine years of infertility) to grow up in a "Westcoast world of blowjobs and Botox," he accepts a two-year assignment at the University of Rome. In this introspective travelogue on the vagaries of love Italian style, Friedland weaves statistics about Italian sexual activity compared to American, with personal observations to create a sort of guide for modern parents. Sorted into five sections that capture Rome in different moods, Friedland opens with an homage to the 1953 William Wyler classic Roman Holiday, the film starring Audrey Hepburn, in which the actress names Rome as her favorite European city. Infidelity and the legacy of Casanova, co-exists with the Holy See in a magical part of the world where Michelangelo "sculpted and painted nudes in great profusion." The central difference between Romans and Californians appears to lie in their attitudes to love and adultery. Perhaps predictably, one daughter has happy memories of the Roman sojourn, while the other experienced a traumatic incident that tainted her experience of Rome. While all this information is thought-provoking, what stands out is the attraction of living in a glamorous city where it's possible to share dinner with director Lina Wertmuller.
