Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome

by Leonard Barkan

The bewitching story of Rome teaching a lonely scholar how to discover himself Satyr Square —part memoir, part literary criticism, part culinary and aesthetic travelogue—is a poignant, hilarious narrative about an American professor spending a magical year in Rome. A scarred veteran of academic culture wars, Leonard Barkan is at first hungry, lonely, and uncertain of his intellectual mission. But soon he is appointed unofficial mascot of an eccentric community of gastronomes, becomes virtually bilingual, and falls in love. As the year progresses, he finds his voice as a writer, loses his lover, and returns definitively to America. His book is the celebration of a life lived in the uncanny spaces where art and real people intersect.

Satyr Square is not just about the Renaissance and ancient statuary, or Shakespeare and Mozart, Charles Bukowski and Paul de Man, eggplant antipasto and Brunello di Montalcino, foot fetishism and sulfur baths. At the heart of the narrative—its surface all irony, humor, and indirection—is a man of genuine ardor, struggling with what it means to be a homosexual and a Jew, trying to rediscover or reinvent his own intellectual passions. Funny, erudite, and lusciously rendered, Satyr Square gives us the whole of a life made up from fragments of Italy, art, food, and longing.

Genres: Italy, Travel, Memoir

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature along with appointments in the Departments of Art and Archaeology, English, and Classics. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and N.Y.U. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale, 1986) and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (Yale, 1999), which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association,Architectural Digest, and Phi Beta Kappa. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy on the subject of food and wine.

He is the author of Satyr Square (Farrar, Straus, 2006; pbk Northwestern, 2008), which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. In recent years, he has published Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010), which treats the artist’s creative and inner life by considering his constant habit of writing words on his drawings, and Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures(Princeton, 2012), an essay about the intersecting worlds of artists and writers from Plato and Praxiteles to Shakespeare and Rembrandt. During 2014-15 he was the Rudolf Arnheim Gastprofessur at the Institut für Kunst und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt University, and he spent a month as a Visiting Professor at Harvard’s I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. During the sabbatical year he completed Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2016. Having delivered the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome in 2011 on the subject of food culture and high culture from antiquity to the Renaissance, he is now completing a book-length version of that subject to be entitled Reading for the Food: Art, Literature, and the Hungry Eye

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I suspect that any oenophile might be delighted by much of this book, but I approached it expecting much more about Rome itself and much less about food and wine, and so was disappointed.

Add to this the fact that the author (not a youth, but rather a middle-aged man) spends far too much of the book detailing his never-to-be satisfied yearning for a married man of uncertain sexual orientation, and you have a book that this reader found often tedious. (Hey, I'm gay myself,and the gay aspect of the book, believe me, is not the problem.)

Too bad, because there are beautifully written passages throughout,and in the last 15 pages Barkan touches briefly on experiences that, had they occupied more of the book, would have made it far more interesting.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barkan is the mentor of my mentor, so I read this selfishly, the way one looks at photos of grandparents to find a nose, a set of the mouth, a brow that looks familiar. Really, though, Barkan is doing the same with the artworks he discusses, searching for bits of recognizable humanity to battle solitude and foreignness. His commentary on art, music, and literature, however, is far, far eclipsed by his description of the meals he's prepared and eaten and the wines he's drunk. My goodness. I want this to be a scratch n' sniff book so I can smell the caramelized pork and roasted figs.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Musings from a man who thinks only of art, wine, food and love. I was almost as envious of that as of his having a place near the Campo dei fiori for a year. I admire the author's ability to make so many friends there, however he seemed to have a knack for finding exceedingly annoying company. That doesn't prevent this memoir from being simply a treat for Romaphiles.

[Alexandra French]

I struggled with this book. Copied lots of passages into my notebook - about the architecture and geometry of Rome - but I didn't like the personality of the writer (who was, because it was non-fiction, a character in the book) and he went off in tangents, that weren't my kind of tangents. Still, glad I read it. Got what I got from it. Can't ask for more.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Poets' voices. I had come to feel, were too easy to hear, which, oddly enough, meant that their voices were being drowned out by too many professors -- my colleagues -- speaking on their behalf. I came to Rome to hear voices hoarse from much longer silence, the voices of material objects, statues of marble and bronze that had lived the public and private life of ancient Rome," (pp 35-36)

This is a memoir of voices, both that of the author and that of the antiquities and that of the Renaissance as well as writers and poets, like Shakespeare. All the voices come together to form the story of a year spent in Rome. But there are also the tastes, for this is as much a culinary journey as an aesthetic travelogue. The combination may prove too much for some readers, but I was at home with the lonely man, Leonard Barkan, at the center and his voices and tastes and experiences were seldom less than interesting. His passions suggested new ideas and thinkers to me and presented his take on those with whom I was already acquainted. All of this within a travelogue with fragments of Italy presented -- fragments and images of places that I enjoyed having shared the author's erudite and humorous views from his year in Rome.

[Neil Orts · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a "dense" book in that there is a lot of information on every page. The author is an academic and his interests and economy of words shows a life spent with language. Readers familiar with Don Giovanni or The Merchant of Venice or wine tastings will get more out of this book, but I'd think anyone with a college education might enjoy this book. It's not a quick read, but full of wit and beauty. The richness of the text mimics, I think, the voluptuous (can I use that word in this sense?) nature of Italian opera and culture in general.

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author recounts his creating a life in Rome during a year's sabbatical - connecting with the city and the language, and attempting to connect with a number of Romans, with some successes, some near misses, and a couple of unaccountable failures. Mozart and Shakespeare and other authors keep him company during the early days of living alone. Mostly engaging, sometimes very funny; I encountered only infrequent dry patches.

[ACRL]

Read by ACRL Member of the Week Arlie Sims. Learn more about Arlie on the ACRL Insider blog.

[Joe Whitney · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book but found I hated it--couldn't get past the first chapter.