Four Seasons in Rome — On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

The Prize

In 2004, Anthony Doerr was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome — a year-long residency for artists and scholars to live and work in the city. He had just published his first novel, About Grace, and was working on what would eventually become All the Light We Cannot See. He and his wife also had, just before leaving for Rome, twin sons.

Four Seasons in Rome covers the year that followed: the apartment in the Academy’s Villa Aurelia, the walks through Trastevere and the Forum and the Colosseum and the Pantheon, the desperate logistics of managing twin newborns without the support network of home, and the experience of trying to write while sleep-deprived in a city that is itself the most overwhelming argument for attention.

The Observational Life

What the memoir demonstrates is the observational practice that underlies Doerr’s fiction. He describes light the way he describes it in his novels: with precise attention to what it is doing, where it is falling, what it is illuminating. He notices the archaeological strata of Rome — the way each layer of history sits on another, so that modern Rome and ancient Rome coexist in the same street — with the same eye that produces the layered temporality of his fiction.

The death of John Paul II happens during the year, and Rome becomes the site of one of the largest funerals in recorded history. Doerr watches from the streets and the rooftops with the same attention he brings to everything else.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — A beautiful memoir and an insight into the observational sensibility that makes Doerr’s fiction distinctive. Best read alongside All the Light We Cannot See.

A Year of Learning to Look

Beneath its surface as a charming account of an expatriate year, Four Seasons in Rome is really a book about attention — about the training of the eye that underlies all of Doerr’s fiction. The memoir’s tacit argument is that observation is not a passive gift but a discipline, something that can be cultivated and deepened, and that a year in Rome with nothing to do but look (and care for two newborns) was for Doerr a kind of apprenticeship in seeing. He describes the city’s light the way he describes light in his novels, with a precise attention to where it falls and what it reveals, and the reader watches a writer consciously sharpening the instrument that will later produce All the Light We Cannot See.

This makes the book unusually rewarding for anyone who admires Doerr’s fiction, because it exposes the sensibility behind it without the mediation of plot. The same eye that would render Marie-Laure’s tactile world or the layered timelines of Cloud Cuckoo Land is here turned on the ordinary miracles of a single city — the archaeological strata of Rome, where each era sits atop the last so that the ancient and the modern share a single street, the quality of evening light on stone, the small daily textures of a foreign life.

Twins, Sleeplessness, and the Comedy of the Ordinary

What keeps the memoir from preciousness is its honesty about the chaos in which all this attention had to be practised. Doerr and his wife arrived in Rome with twin infant sons, and the book is unsparing and frequently funny about the logistics of managing two newborns without the support network of home — the sleeplessness, the failed attempts to write, the comic indignities of new parenthood transplanted to a foreign country. This domestic material grounds the more rhapsodic passages about Roman beauty in a recognizable human reality. The sublime and the sleep-deprived coexist on the same page, and the memoir is better for refusing to separate them.

Rome as the World’s Stage

The year’s great public event was the death of Pope John Paul II, which turned Rome into the site of one of the largest funerals in recorded history, and Doerr watches it unfold with the same patient attention he brings to everything else. The convergence of millions on the city, the transformation of familiar streets into the centre of global mourning, gives the memoir a sudden widening of scale — the private year of babies and sentences abruptly opening onto world history. It is a fitting culmination for a book about learning to see: the observer who has spent months training his eye on the small and the local is granted, at the end, a spectacle of the largest possible kind, and brings to it exactly the same quality of attention.

Rome as the World’s Stage

The year’s great public event was the death of Pope John Paul II, which turned Rome into the site of one of the largest funerals in recorded history, and Doerr watches it unfold with the same patient attention he brings to everything else. The convergence of millions on the city, the transformation of familiar streets into the centre of global mourning, gives the memoir a sudden widening of scale — the private year of babies and sentences abruptly opening onto world history. It is a fitting culmination for a book about learning to see: the observer who has spent months training his eye on the small and the local is granted, at the end, a spectacle of the largest possible kind, and brings to it exactly the same quality of attention.

Reading Guides

• All the Light We Cannot See — Full Review
• Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr — Full Review