Author Description

<p><b>One of <i>Vanity Fair’</i>s Best Books of 2022 </b><br><br><b>“Milton Gendel had the good fortune to live a wildly entertaining life in Rome—a charmed, romantic period he captured in diaries and photos. Milton had the further good fortune to have Cullen Murphy bring this vanished dolce vita to life.” —Graydon Carter, coeditor of <i>Air Mail</i></b><br><b><br>A never-before-seen treasure trove of photos and diary entries from the celebrated photographer Milton Gendel that bring Rome’s midcentury heyday to life.</b><br><br>“I’m just passing through,” Milton Gendel liked to say whenever anybody asked him what he was doing in Rome. Even after seven decades in the Eternal City, from his arrival as a Fulbright Scholar in 1949 until his death in 2018 at the age of ninety-nine, he refused to be pigeonholed. He was always an American—never an “expat,” never an émigré—but he couldn’t leave, so deep were his ties, and this dual bond left an indelible imprint on his life and art.<br><br>Born in New York City to Russian immigrants, Gendel first made his way to Meyer Schapiro’s classroom at Columbia University and then to Greenwich Village, where he and his friend Robert Motherwell joined the circle of surrealists around Peggy Guggenheim and André Breton. But it was Rome that earned his enduring fascination—the city supplied him with endless outlets for his curiosity, a series of dazzling apartments in palazzi, the great loves of his life, and the scores of friendships that made his story inextricably part of the city’s own.<br><br>Gendel did much more than just pass through, instead becoming one of Rome’s foremost documentarians. He spoke Italian fluently, worked for the industrialist Adriano Olivetti, and sampled the latest currents of Italian art as a correspondent for <i>ARTnews</i>. And he was an artist in his own right, capturing the lives of Sicilian peasants and British royals alike on film and showing his photographs at the Roman outpost of the Marlborough Gallery.