Just Rome. Images of Italy XXI

Arkady Ippolitov is the guardian of the Italian engraving cabinet in the State Hermitage, the largest connoisseur and a subtle connoisseur of Italian history and culture. The hero of his book is Rome, an amazing city, the city of the great style. Many characters flash on the pages: dads and emperors, the greatest artists and brilliant architects, charming beauties and irresistible adventurers - a brilliant retinue of the eternal city. The relaxed ease of a talented writer, who also has huge knowledge and impeccable taste, fills the pages with love and elegant irony. Basilicians and palaces, squares and fountains, statues and paintings come to life under his pen. They also become characters - each has its own story, its own fate, but the entire motley kaleidoscope of various individual stories merges into a single narrative that you can’t call a novel otherwise.
A feature of the creative method of Arkady Ippolitov is an encyclopedic awareness, a brilliant literary style, as well as free, associative thinking that allows him to fly from one era to another without visible efforts, to build bold and witty concepts, to reveal secret codes in the history of world art