ABSTRACT
Even before Gore Vidal first visited the surviving ruins of ancient Rome, it was already a place and a time he knew very well. In Screening History (1993), the American writer recalls his adolescent encounter with the city in 1939:
Despite the heat of Rome in August, I was ecstatic. At last I was where I belonged. I haunted the Forum and the Palatine. In addition to all the Roman movies that I had seen, the first grown-up book that I ever read was a Victorian edition of Stories from Livy. I was steeped in Rome. I also lived in a city whose marble columns were a self-conscious duplicate of the old capital of the world. Of course Washington then lacked six of the seven hills and a contiguous world empire. Later, we got the empire but not the hills.
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