Notes from a Roman Terrace Book

A delightful travel memoir of contemporary life in Rome, by the author of the well-loved Notes from an Italian Garden.

Joan Marble has lived in a sixteenth-century Roman palazzo apartment with husband Robert, a sculptor, for over forty years. A lifetime of mingling with the citizens of Rome and pottering about on her beloved terrace above the city rooftops has resulted in this warm and witty book.

Highly personal and brimming with anecdote, history and insight, Joan’s experience of Rome and Romans is infected by her contagious fascination for plants, a hobby she shares every week with the Women’s Gardening Club of Rome. She includes an insider’s view of Italian fellow gardening-obsessives, and an authoritative view of famous Italian Gardens. Woven into her gardening tales are her informed views on everyday life in the city; of partying, politics and popes; of bicycle thieves and cat-catchers, and how to deal with those friends-of-friends who arrive so regularly in Rome with nowhere to stay.

Imbued with a special feel for history and human observation, this idiosyncratic study of Joan’s beloved home will delight armchair gardeners and travellers alike.

Kirkus Reviews

Marble (Notes from an Italian Garden, 2001) casts a sophisticated eye over episodes of her 40-year residence in the heart of old Rome. Experienced from both street level and the terrace of her 16th-century apartment on the Piazza Borghese, her impressions possess a pleasing durability, evidence that ancient Roman social, political, and family arrangements—bureaucratic patronage, a tradition of gregariousness, and a penchant for the sensual—still pertain. You can practically hear the silk rustle in Marble s charming, elegant prose, even when her stories are weightless and fail to stick in any memorable fashion. Little unites these observations other than their author, who goes on about the idiosyncrasies of her maid, her husband s bad luck when it comes to bicycles (they re always being stolen), the seagulls that trouble her equanimity, the spats with neighbors and doormen, the click of a mason's hammer, the return of the swifts. Marble takes umbrage at the tawdriness and ubiquity of Italian television and despairs over the traffic. "The street of Rome, built for walking and small chariots, have been taken over by an army of vehicles," she writes. Perhaps understandably, she often sounds distracted, as if she would rather be thinking about something else. Gardening, for instance: when Marble turns to that topic, though it too tends to be seen in soft focus, she finally displays some passion and a few firm opinions. She appreciates "the trend towards a more personal, less constrained garden style," she gives sharp reports of gardens in Palmero and the Lepanti Mountains, and she has valuable advice when it comes to the art of the terrace garden. Though the author at times gives theimpression that she s talking to herself, overall this reads like a series of postcard invocations to Rome: beautiful, intimate, friendly, and welcoming to the gardener.