TOW #24: "Four Seasons in Rome" (part 2)

                Serving as a snapshot of a family’s one year experience living in Italy, Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr is a truly beautiful tale of nonfiction. Doerr, the first person narrator of the story, slowly explains how he and his family get to know the city over time and fall in love with it. Rome is very famous for its beautify, and any tourist can tell you, although likely in a much less elegant way than Doerr describes it, that Rome is “a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways”. But Doerr goes beyond these well-crafted sentences that state in artistic ways things that are held by many as common knowledge about Rome. He takes the time to stop and fall in love with the little things, the kind of nuances not found in travel pamphlets. He observes, “A travel website says that there are 280 fountains in Rome, but it seems as if there are more:...Remove them and there is no present tense, no circulatory system, nor dreams to balance the waking hours. No Rome”, making beautiful and complex analogies that really help the reader discover the feel of the city that is almost as good as being there themselves. He says to “Look closely and the picturesque inevitably cracks apart and becomes more interesting”. While he is getting to know Rome, Doerr and his wife are also getting to know what parenting is like. Doerr learns that “Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor--it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people”, but also realizes “Whoever says adults are better at paying attention than children is wrong: we're too busying filtering out the world, focusing on some task or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new contents all day long”. By observing his children, Doerr learns more about himself and humanity. From his use of incredibly artful language to his deep and honest themes, Doerr does an excellent job describing his four seasons in Rome.