Alizah Holstein’s My Roman History is a fascinating memoir that blends Roman history with her own.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Historian Holstein elegantly interweaves academic inquiry and autobiography in this lush debut memoir about her love affair with Italy . . . serious Italophiles are a shoo-in for Holstein’s lovingly rendered tribute to one of the world’s greatest cities. This sings.”
In her own words, here is Alizah Holstein’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir My Roman History:
Music runs like a minor background theme in My Roman History, emerging and receding with the passage of time. The work is in large part memoir, with history and speculation woven in, and music was a helpful tool in my writing process for accessing emotions, thoughts, and states of being from times past. Sometimes music also contributed in less expected ways, such as giving me ideas for form and structure, or imparting lessons about the balance between expressivity and restraint. Some pieces in this playlist are emblematic of discrete periods of my past, while others I have listened to continuously over decades. They all tie into My Roman History, and they have cumulatively helped bring this book into being.
- “La canzone del amore perduto,” Fabrizio De André
In this song I hear my earliest longings for Italy. The summer after I graduated high school, my English teacher connected me with three Italian boys who were visiting Boston. Every afternoon when I got off work, the boys and I ambled around Brookline and Boston with what I remember as an aimless, curiosity-infused pleasure. They were curious about Boston, and maybe, too, about me; I was certainly curious about them. One of them later sent me a mix tape with his favorite Italian songs. This song by Fabrizio De André, like the others on that tape, was an early portal into Italian culture. De André’s voice and the trombone accompaniment bring me back to those early feelings of longing, curiosity, and excitement about the future. When writing the early chapters of My Roman History, I would frequently listen to this song to help me access my late teenage state of mind and heart. It still has the power to open up for me that exquisite state that feels a little like broken-heartedness and little like joy.
- Mozart, Don Giovanni, K.527, Act 1 “Ah! Chi mi dice mai”
In My Roman History, music comes into the foreground with especial relevance in Part II, which narrates my experiences in college and graduate school. When I was a college student in New York City, I often visited the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall because I had access to cheap student tickets. My favorite opera was Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which I went to see at least three times between 1994 and 2004. Once I was in the standing room at the far back of the orchestra, near the doors, when an older couple rose from their seats after the first act and, before leaving, generously offered me and the stranger beside me—a librarian, I remember—their seats in the second row center. It was an unforgettable experience.
I always eagerly anticipate this aria, in which Donna Elvira reacts to news of her former lover, Don Giovanni’s, duplicity. I find the irony in the scene so pleasurable as Don Giovanni pities the weeping young woman (whom he naively assumes will be his next conquest) from afar, not realizing that she is a former lover fuming over the fact that he has jilted her. Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto is brilliant. In this scene, Da Ponte places Don Giovanni’s banal lexicon of seduction (bella, signorina, poverina) in stark contrast with Donna Elvira’s veritable thesaurus (barbaro, mostro, fellon, nido d’inganni, sciagurato, scellerato) of terms to describe an unfaithful lover.
- “Goldberg Variations,” Johann Sebastian Bach, BWV 988, performed by Glenn Gould
When writing My Roman History, I went back for the first time in at least a decade to listen to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” as performed by Glenn Gould. I wrote much of Part II listening to the Variations on repeat. I think this is possibly why I used the word “fugue” several times to describe Roman architecture, such as when describing the interplay between courtyard, church façade and sky in the Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza complex in Rome. Fugues were most certainly on my mind! I also, at that time, got interested in reading Gould’s essays and so came to admire not only his music but the clarity of his writing.
I knew the Variations well because my former boyfriend, one who had been a defining influence on my early adulthood, was a brilliant mathematician and aspiring pianist and he practiced the piano many hours a day in our little apartment in Ithaca, New York. I don’t think I realized how well I knew them until, a decade later, I went back to listen while writing my book and it struck me that I remembered almost every note. One thing that stands out to me in listening to the Goldberg Variations now is that, although I associate the music with a certain time in my life, it also feels new each time I hear it.
- “Lobo Lopez,” Kiko Veneno
My Roman History delves into what has drawn me to Rome, but I also have a Spanish story that began when I met a madrileño fellow, now my husband, in graduate school. He introduced me to the music of Kiko Veneno and other Iberian musicians of his youth. Kiko Veneno’s music stands at the intersection of rock and flamenco, what you might get, for example, if you mixed Bob Dylan with Camarón de la Isla and added a pinch of magical realism to the lyrics.
I didn’t speak Spanish, then, but I began to learn the language through song lyrics. My madrileño boyfriend and I would sing together on car rides, when we were cooking together, and whenever the chance arose. When I had to leave him behind to embark on my research trip to Rome, I took a Kiko Veneno CD with me and listened to it nostalgically.
- “Pines of Rome,” Ottorino Respighi
I listened to “Pines of Rome” frequently while writing My Roman History. It’s good writing music for me, atmospheric in a way that doesn’t distract me from the words I’m putting down on the page. It’s (mostly) less dramatic than the Rienzi overture, and I can also sense connections to later Roman film music, such as the compositions of Nino Rota that appeared in Fellini’s Roma. “The Pines of Rome” meditates on the passage of time and on the Rome’s geography and flora, on life and death, youth and old age, peace and conquest, rise and decline—so it has a certain wholeness to it, at once ethereal and earthy.
- “Rundinella,” Massimo Ranieri
While I was in Rome for graduate research, I learned to rock climb in a course taught by the Club Alpino Italiano (CAI). Among the friends I made there, one often played Neapolitan singer Massimo Ranieri’s album Oggi o dimane while we were driving to and from the outings. To this day, Rundinella’s pining melody and lyrics about the dear departed “little sparrow” cut straight through me. The Neapolitan dialect is so different from the Roman one, and it was one my Roman friends enjoyed. Once, in the van returning from a climbing trip, everyone was passing around and reciting a book of Neapolitan poetry. Everyone was having the best time. When it was my turn, I grew shy and couldn’t bring myself to read it aloud because I knew I’d sound ridiculous. I think everyone was disappointed. They wanted to hear the Americana speak Neapolitan!
- Rienzi: Overture, Richard Wagner
Years after I finished my history doctorate, I decided to write about the fourteenth-century Roman revolutionary figure Cola di Rienzo because I felt he sat at the center of a compelling story. This is the original seed from which My Roman History eventually grew. Many days when I sat down to write, I played this opera from the beginning. It’s a nineteenth-century work but it helped me get into the emotional space I needed to write about Cola’s very extravagant persona. Although Wagner eventually came to find the music of Rienzi to be an embarrassment, a kind of youthful extravagance, I think Cola would have loved it. The trumpets, drums, and cymbals portend Cola’s bravado and military might, while his dreamy aspirational quality appears in the recurring theme played by the violins and violas. Even Cola’s playfulness occasionally comes through. Whatever it says about my musical taste, I get swept up in this overture each time I hear it. And I’m pretty sure Cola would have, too.
- “World to Come IV,” David Lang and Maya Beiser, from The Great Beauty soundtrack
This song featured in the film La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), directed by Paolo Sorrentino. Especially on those occasions when I have no destination in mind, I enjoy walking around Rome listening to Maya Beiser on the cello. The repeating meditative theme enhances a side of Rome I often seek but that I sometimes must work to find. This song tethers earthly Rome, its dark caverns and subterranean structures, to its illuminated skies, its golden light, the sense of eternity that one stumbles into in Rome as in few other cities. It’s no easier to capture a city in music than it is in words, but to me, this song captures an element of Rome that I cherish.
- “La disciplina della terra,” Ivano Fossati
When I felt pulled back to Rome after a long time away, this song was one I went back to. The idea that life doesn’t always give us what we want in the way we want it was something I was wrestling with. I felt that I had lost my connection to Rome and to an element of myself, and I knew of no way to get those back. It was a painful period, more so because even I was perplexed at the strength of my feelings. Ivano Fossati’s lyrics are poetic while feeling simultaneously restrained, and I connected with the tension inherent to that dichotomy.
- “Early Roman Kings,” Bob Dylan
The infusion of imagination into history in this blues song appeals to me. I love a good Dylan song, and this one superimposes this fanciful rendering of kings from almost 3,000 years ago onto what feels like 1970s street life. “All the early Roman kings, in their sharkskin suits/ bowties and buttons/ high top boots.” Will I ever again imagine Romulus without that shiny sharkskin jacket? Or Numa Pompilius without his heeled high top boots? One central question I wrestled with when writing My Roman History was what my history education meant to me after leaving the academic profession behind. It took me years before I could feel playful with history in the way that Dylan does seemingly so easily in this song.
- “7 vizi Capitale,” Piotta and Il Muro del Canto
I first heard this when it was the theme song for the Netflix television series Suburra. The series is unusual for Italian television in that it contains dialogue in Italian, Romanesco (the traditional dialect spoken in Rome), Neapolitan, Sicilian, as well as in Sinti/Romani (spoken by the Romani in Rome). In “7 vizi Capitale,” Piotta, the principal vocalist, combines Romanesco rap with traditional music to offer both a tribute and an elegy to a city both ‘holy” and “dissolute,” a city of contrasts.
Part III of My Roman History narrates a year in which I was searching for my own Rome, one that wasn’t tied necessarily to any academic institution, and I ended up meeting a slew of friends from different walks of Roman life. If the song “World to Come IV” (#6 on the My Roman History playlist) summons ethereal Rome, “7 vizi Capitale” invokes Rome as voluptuous, gritty, decadent, and hungry. I came closest to feeling this when, as narrated in chapter 15, “Living Latin,” AS Roma defeated Parma to win the 2001 Champions League title and I got trapped on via Marmorata among the throngs of ecstatic celebrants. My conclusion is that there is no one Rome without the other. Both are real, both palpable.
- “Aria di Roma,” Nino Rota, from the soundtrack to Fellini’s Roma
To complete the soundtrack, I return to a classic: Nino Rota’s “Aria di Roma,” the backbone of the soundtrack to Federico Fellini’s film, Roma, in which Fellini presents a pastiche of memories of the city while also filming his own act of filming. “Aria di Roma” always makes me think of a Roman street at night. It feels to me like walking home alone at the end of a long afternoon with friends that has stretched into late evening without your even noticing. You’re the last one out, the last awake in a slumbering city, and the soles of your shoes are clicking quickly on the cobblestones, the echo bouncing back to you off shuttered windows while the scent of jasmine clings to your face and hair in the moist night air.
Alizah Holstein holds a PhD in history from Cornell University and an MFA in nonfiction writing and literary translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives with her family in Providence, Rhode Island.