Satyr Square : a year, a life in Rome /

Princeton professor Barkan chronicles a year spent in Rome and paints a city of manic simultaneity. Traffic zooms around centuries of culture, and so Barkan's polyglot narrative bustles about his story. References from Shakespeare to Bukowski, Mozart to Montaigne, pepper his discovery of the city's corners to expose, to himself and to us, the secrets of his spirit. His is a year of food and wine, love and longing, and its poignancy is ripe. Barkan's prose is as dense as his city's ancient stone walls and as bright as the tawny afternoon light that illuminates them. Like vines heavy with grapes, sentences droop under the weight of their words, yet the arc of his story is resilient. Barkan displays such an inspiring affinity to his surroundings that one wonders if the man captured the city or if the city captured the man. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. We have but to gaze on the sparkling threads of his teeming tapestry, united by an ardent, personal voice, and drink in its vulnerable glory. --Thomas Barthelmess Copyright 2006 Booklist

Barkan, a Princeton professor of comparative literature, spent a year in Rome working on a book on the Roman Renaissance practice of exhuming ancient sculpture (Unearthing the Past). In true academic manner, Barkan recounts his year through critiques of the art and society surrounding him, from the contemporary literature that graced the bookshelf in his fifth-floor apartment and the recording of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni that was his first serious introduction to the Italian language, to the buildings along his daily jaunts. As Barkan reads into Rome, Rome "reads" him and the same art that he studies acts as a key to uncover his own layers of self. In a simplistic example, Barkan's study of the eternal fascination with Spinaro, a bronze sculpture of a youth continually represented in Roman art, illuminates his own attraction to an equally striking young man. This weighty read feels like a multicourse meal served too quickly; one is left feeling overfull from not being able to savor one course before the subsequent one arrives. Yet Barkan's critical prowess is enviable, and the overarching theme of art's universal and everlasting power to represent life is satisfying to anyone dedicated to art or its study. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

During the 1980s, Princeton professor Barkan spent a yearlong sabbatical in Rome as he began the research for his book Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. He took an apartment on the fifth floor of a building on Piazza dei Satiri and, after a lonely start, immersed himself in the life of the city. Here he weaves together his passion for food, wine, art, literature, and people with his fascination for all things Italian to tell a complicated story about the self-exploration of a disillusioned middle-aged man. Some readers will enjoy imagining themselves in Barkan's place, surrounded by colorful characters, great art, and gastronomic delights. Others will connect with his unhappy recollections of his Jewish upbringing and his frequently ambiguous relationships with men. This very personal view of a man and a city has both humorous and serious moments and is recommended for culture studies collections in large academic and public libraries.-Linda M. Kaufmann, Massachusetts Coll. of Liberal Arts Lib., North Adams (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An art scholar spends a year in Rome, living on the eponymous square, researching and writing a book, sampling the gastronomic and vinous bounties of the city, feeling lonely, enriching his Italian. Barkan finished his book, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, but it's hard to see how if he cooked and ate and drank and socialized and viewed works of art and listened to Mozart as frequently as these pages record. What a busy man! And what a supremely educated man, as well. Allusions are as thick in his prose as, oh, chunks of tomato (fresh, of course) in a good pasta sauce. Yet nothing seems forced. If he sees aspects of The Merchant of Venice or Don Giovanni in all he is doing at the time, well, that's because these works are not exterior to him; they form part of his remarkably complex interior. Barkan's memoir is loosely chronological, but within each segment, he moves freely about in time, sometimes many years, sometimes merely moments. He writes easily about Henry James and Hawthorne, Roman history and architecture and art; he and a new friend can, impetuously, plop down and play a four-hand piece by Schubert; he can hide salmon caviar inside an artichoke; he can expatiate about the concept of ekphrasis (writing about visual objects) and the delicacies of French wine. There are passages about food preparation, about crushes on other men (he admires a friend's "bulge" in his skimpy Speedo as they share space in an ancient bath), and, always, about art and aesthetics. He joins an eclectic group of wine-tasters, struggles to make his Italian convey what he knows and thinks and feels, and begins to have epiphanies of various sorts--e.g., food and work and music go together. A book for gourmands and vinologists, for lovers of Shakespeare and Mozart and art and architecture, for those who, like the author, realize that all is metaphor. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.