ABSTRACT
This chapter is built around an autobiographical anecdote about the writer’s journey to Rome interrupted by the eruption of a volcano in Iceland. The ensuing turmoil, for the writer and millions of other tourists, is described, along with observations of Rome as a particular, ‘classic’ or typical locus for European history, and as one of the centres of the Grand Tourist tradition. The chapter is imbued with the ironic tone of someone exasperated, but alights on serious reference to Freud, Siegfried Kracauer, Proust, and Walter Benjamin, and includes a diversion to the Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR), a fascist-built suburb of the city used by Michelangelo Antonioni to transmit a peculiarly modern atmosphere in his movie L’Eclisse.
