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My Roman History: A Memoir
In this exquisite and profound memoir, a medieval historian traces her lifelong obsession with Rome and the encounters with the city’s past and present that became fulcrum points in her life
From the time she first felt called to its gates as a high school student fascinated by Dante and Italian thanks to a life-changing teacher, Rome has been a fixed star around which Alizah Holstein’s life has rotated—despite the fact that she bears no Italian heritage, and has never lived there long enough to call it home.
In this kaleidoscopic yet intimate memoir, her shifting relationship to a vibrant city layered with human history becomes a lens on why we look to the past, on the mysteries of affinity and desire, and on what it means to grow up. Holstein weaves the stories of Romans past and present, and encounters with the city of historical figures from Petrarch to Freud, into the narrative of her evolution from a curious student abuzz with the thrill of discovery, to a lonely researcher in a city to which she feels she belongs despite knowing no one, to an ambitious young historian struggling to find her place in the halls of academia. Following a trail of memories—that first taste of a tartufo cioccolato in Piazza Navona, the ancient walls of the Via Appia blurring from the back of a motorcycle, the smudge of ink on a manuscript left by a scribe's hand over seven hundred years before—she explores what it means to be romana , Roman—and to find solace and self-knowledge in the presence of the past.
An enveloping, original, and deeply resonant account, set against one of the world's most beguiling cities, of the unexpected things that give our lives meaning, My Roman History is a profound depiction of the winding path to self-realization, which—much like history itself—is mysterious, captivating, and ever-unfolding.
From the time she first felt called to its gates as a high school student fascinated by Dante and Italian thanks to a life-changing teacher, Rome has been a fixed star around which Alizah Holstein’s life has rotated—despite the fact that she bears no Italian heritage, and has never lived there long enough to call it home.
In this kaleidoscopic yet intimate memoir, her shifting relationship to a vibrant city layered with human history becomes a lens on why we look to the past, on the mysteries of affinity and desire, and on what it means to grow up. Holstein weaves the stories of Romans past and present, and encounters with the city of historical figures from Petrarch to Freud, into the narrative of her evolution from a curious student abuzz with the thrill of discovery, to a lonely researcher in a city to which she feels she belongs despite knowing no one, to an ambitious young historian struggling to find her place in the halls of academia. Following a trail of memories—that first taste of a tartufo cioccolato in Piazza Navona, the ancient walls of the Via Appia blurring from the back of a motorcycle, the smudge of ink on a manuscript left by a scribe's hand over seven hundred years before—she explores what it means to be romana , Roman—and to find solace and self-knowledge in the presence of the past.
An enveloping, original, and deeply resonant account, set against one of the world's most beguiling cities, of the unexpected things that give our lives meaning, My Roman History is a profound depiction of the winding path to self-realization, which—much like history itself—is mysterious, captivating, and ever-unfolding.
368 pages, Hardcover
Published June 25, 2024
24 people are currently reading
3623 people want to read
About the author
Alizah Holstein
1 book19 followersAlizah Holstein is the author of My Roman History (Viking Press). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts’ “International MFA” program, and a PhD in medieval Italian history from Cornell University. She has published essays in Hamilton Arts & Letters, World Literature Today, MarketWatch, Literary Hub, and others. Alizah lives with her family and their rescue pup in Providence, RI.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 10, 2024
I rarely read memoirs, but I love Rome, so I decided to give this book a chance. I am glad I did. This book blends together a personal story of becoming with the history of medieval Rome and a few short essays. The author’s narrative voice, like Virgil leading Dante, deftly guides the reader through these three distinct genres. The personal story is driven by the question: “Why do we love the things we love?,” exploring what happens when we lose the things we love, the city of Rome or the career the author spent years of hard work preparing for. The history sections, well, I wish more history books were written with this love and care for the reader. The author makes history accessible and relatable. I knew nothing about Medieval Rome, the period when the city fell to its lowest with the Pope away in France. The book had me reading more on Wikipedia and realizing how talented the author is in her ability to present complicated geopolitical stories succinctly. The short essays, I recall one on photographer Ruth Orkin, truly honor the open reflection of the genre as it best. These are not opinion pieces but rather meditations that read like a counterbalance balm in our time of reactive and polarizing social media. The book is punctuated by many beautiful, illuminating sentences that make the history of this beloved city or women's experiences in Italy vivid and human. This is not the stereotypical narrative of becoming, and there are no trite descriptions of Italian culture or food. Drinking cheap boxed wine in a Roman park with Reginal Foster, renowned Latinist to the Pope, or eating pastries out of a fancy box at the cliff before climbing with the Italian Alpine Club, the stories left me wanting to hear more about living in Rome. This book is an honest exploration of the connection between life and history in the shade of one remarkable city. This book feels special and unique, hard to compare to others because of its ability to harmoniously hold together genres, people, and historical moments.
August 18, 2024
I really loved this memoir. Poetic, vulnerable, honest, rich with detail and stories. I could relate to so much of it. I like where it ended up -grounded in reality. Alizah didn’t spin fantasies about academic life for us and really let us in to her emotional world. I've been attracted to stories - fiction and non-fiction - lately about women in their forties and the particular emotional space this age leads us to. I enjoyed Alizah's discussion of it and I can't wait to read what she writes next. She has a beautiful way with words. I would also really like to holiday in Rome with her!
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January 12, 2025When Alizah Holstein was a high school student she set out to travel to Rome. A bit of a problem though as she didn’t have a passport. She eventually got there and this memoir covers her obsession with the Italian city and how it led to her being a historian. The life of an academic was fascinating and drew me in more so than the Roman history that was included. An interesting read as a passion can often be a blessing and a curse.
Thank you Viking for sending me a free copy! All thoughts expressed are my honest opinion.
Thank you Viking for sending me a free copy! All thoughts expressed are my honest opinion.
January 27, 2025
This book is a love letter to Rome. Holstein beautifully threads her coming-of-age story with the city’s layers of history, creating a vivid patchwork of narratives, lives lived and the wonders of its inexorable allure. It is a beautiful journey through a woman’s self discovery led by Dante, Rome, the poetic and the divine.
February 25, 2025
I mean it's right there in the title- "MY" Roman history. Not sure why my expectations going in failed to connect this to the basic fact that this is in fact a memoir.
But I loved having my expectations upended all the same, as it allowed the reflective nature of the simple and captivating prose to catch me by surprise. Not unlike The Half Bird, a memoir I knew nothing about going in but which became one of my favorite reads of last year, I fell under the spell of Holstein's writing.
Part of it is that I love history, and I love philosophy, and Holstein, in telling a story about her journey into academia and out of academia, brings these two things together as she uses her love of Rome to explore her essential search for identity and self.
I also love Rome. Holstein's journey from Portland to Rome is framed by two things- her love of Dante, and her year long dissertation which she does through a boots on the ground approach by spending a year in Rome. The essential question she is exploring is, what does a place do when it is neither the seat of the Papacy or the world Empire. Narrowing in on the thirteenth century when this was indeed the case, it becomes a fascinating window into Rome's sense of its own identity.
It's a deeply quotable book, it's also a meditative process. The bookends are powerful, helping to underscore how it is we frame a journey differently looking forward than we do looking backwards, which makes all the substantive work of the books body contextually meaningful, and often profound,
But I loved having my expectations upended all the same, as it allowed the reflective nature of the simple and captivating prose to catch me by surprise. Not unlike The Half Bird, a memoir I knew nothing about going in but which became one of my favorite reads of last year, I fell under the spell of Holstein's writing.
Part of it is that I love history, and I love philosophy, and Holstein, in telling a story about her journey into academia and out of academia, brings these two things together as she uses her love of Rome to explore her essential search for identity and self.
I also love Rome. Holstein's journey from Portland to Rome is framed by two things- her love of Dante, and her year long dissertation which she does through a boots on the ground approach by spending a year in Rome. The essential question she is exploring is, what does a place do when it is neither the seat of the Papacy or the world Empire. Narrowing in on the thirteenth century when this was indeed the case, it becomes a fascinating window into Rome's sense of its own identity.
It's a deeply quotable book, it's also a meditative process. The bookends are powerful, helping to underscore how it is we frame a journey differently looking forward than we do looking backwards, which makes all the substantive work of the books body contextually meaningful, and often profound,
November 24, 2024
The history of Rome entwined with a memoir. What I took from reading this book, which I loved, was what most of us have, the profound love of a place that speaks to us and which is not always easy to explain. The love that Holstein has for Rome and its history is evident in her ability to explain it to a layperson. She made me love Rome too.
September 26, 2024
I've enjoyed this memoir. It's beautifully written and skillfully woven with the history of Rome. I especially love the way the author writes about the grief of losing a city and self-doubt in a new chapter of life.
July 18, 2024
This book is beautiful. Although history was never my strength, the way the author weaves her story with the history of Rome made this a book that I simply couldn’t put down. There were so many times where she expressed exactly how I was feeling as I read her story and related it to my own. A must read in my opinion.
August 4, 2024
Loved it. I saw a review in the NYT and figured it would be a good summer read. And it totally was— it felt like a vacation with a thoughtful and entertaining friend. The author strikes a good balance between memoir and interesting history. I read pretty fast at first— Holstein is engaging and vulnerable in her storytelling. But as I got near the end, I found myself reading slower and slower because I didn’t want to leave the world of the book (I hate that post-good-book letdown feeling). When I finished it though, it really stuck with me and stayed in my mind for days, dreamlike, a little surreal, totally wonderful. Can’t wait to read it again actually.
February 5, 2025
I share a soul with this author
November 19, 2024
This was a delightfully engaging memoir. It is an artful—I might say, lyrical—weaving of history, culture, art, and a young woman’s growth.
As a memoir, we are looking for personal experiences. Ms. Holstein provides that as we follow her passion for all things Roman through her education path to a Ph.D. in a niche of a niche of history and, eventually, abandoning her intended vocation. But she never falls out of her infatuation with Rome.
How the rest is seamlessly woven in is what raises the story to more than just a personal accounting. Early on, we are exposed to Dante—a recurring theme through the story—and the next thing we know, we’re being reintroduced to The Divine Comedy with more insight than instructors in my school courses provided me. Early on we are alerted to a 14th century climber, Cola di Rienzo. A fascinating player who few of us non-Romans are unlikely to have heard of—who reappears as a featured player midway through Holstein’s tale.
However, just pages apart from Dante, we are also introduced to the author’s grandparents, who lived in Naples in the late 1940s, where her grandfather was assigned by the newly-formed United Nations. It is from them—it seems by osmosis-- that Ms. Holstein develops her early fascination with Italy.
And so it goes, as Holstein weaves her personal tale of alpine climbing in Ripa Maiala or devouring bomboloni at a stop in Latina Scalo. She is searching at two levels: for an understanding of Rome and for herself. She takes her readers with her on a journey that is meandering yet a chronologically straight line. If that seems contradictory—well, that is the strength and charm of Holstein's writing and the book’s structure.
I should add that this is not the type of memoir I would have ordinarily picked up. I did so because I have known the author’s family for many years and was invited to the book launch event, where I purchased the book. However, I have too many books on my nightstand to have read and enjoyed it to the end if I hadn’t been totally captivated by My Roman History.
As a memoir, we are looking for personal experiences. Ms. Holstein provides that as we follow her passion for all things Roman through her education path to a Ph.D. in a niche of a niche of history and, eventually, abandoning her intended vocation. But she never falls out of her infatuation with Rome.
How the rest is seamlessly woven in is what raises the story to more than just a personal accounting. Early on, we are exposed to Dante—a recurring theme through the story—and the next thing we know, we’re being reintroduced to The Divine Comedy with more insight than instructors in my school courses provided me. Early on we are alerted to a 14th century climber, Cola di Rienzo. A fascinating player who few of us non-Romans are unlikely to have heard of—who reappears as a featured player midway through Holstein’s tale.
However, just pages apart from Dante, we are also introduced to the author’s grandparents, who lived in Naples in the late 1940s, where her grandfather was assigned by the newly-formed United Nations. It is from them—it seems by osmosis-- that Ms. Holstein develops her early fascination with Italy.
And so it goes, as Holstein weaves her personal tale of alpine climbing in Ripa Maiala or devouring bomboloni at a stop in Latina Scalo. She is searching at two levels: for an understanding of Rome and for herself. She takes her readers with her on a journey that is meandering yet a chronologically straight line. If that seems contradictory—well, that is the strength and charm of Holstein's writing and the book’s structure.
I should add that this is not the type of memoir I would have ordinarily picked up. I did so because I have known the author’s family for many years and was invited to the book launch event, where I purchased the book. However, I have too many books on my nightstand to have read and enjoyed it to the end if I hadn’t been totally captivated by My Roman History.
July 16, 2024
I am going with a 3.5 rating on this one so I’ll round up to 4. The author draws parallels of her own self discovery to the people of Ancient Rome.You watch Alizah grow up and evolve in her memoir with Rome tagging along the whole way. Sometimes the material could get a little deep divey into Rome where I occasionally would get lost because I simply just don’t know Ancient Rome as well as the author, the people, the places, the history. Alizah absolutely knows what she’s talking about with her lifelong dedication to Roman history and I truly wanted to love this one. The beautiful cover drew me in but this was not one of my favorites. I’m not sure if that’s just because I’m not well versed on the history but I don’t feel I should need to be an expert in order to understand where Alizah was going with it. Some chapters I absolutely loved that detailed her classes she was taking and experiencing Rome for the first time (which brought me to 3.5 star rating due to how much I loved those) and others just bored me and felt like I was forcing myself to get through it. No doubt that Alizah’s heart is in Rome but I find that this book is going to be hit or miss for readers and hate to say it was a bit of a miss for me personally. Another reader mentioned this may be a good candidate of a book to go back and read again so I may need to do that and see where I stand when I get a chance to come back to it. #goodreadsgiveaway
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October 31, 2024My Roman History is a memoir—or as the author puts it, a storia, both story and history. It’s intelligent, honest, and beautifully written. It’s about our unreasonable passions and how, sometimes, if we listen, our past calls to us through a voice, a thing, or a place—in this case, Rome. The story shows how reading and falling in love with a book can sometimes change the path before us, guiding us and becoming the one true thing we feel, even if it is fleeting at times. The book is filled with historical insights about Rome, but it’s more about our connection with a city, with ourselves, and with a desire to know more. It speaks to how challenging the path of study and gaining knowledge can be, especially for a woman in academia, and how lonely that journey can feel. It’s a memoir, but it’s more than that. It’s like one of those ancient voyagers’ diaries, full of wisdom and philosophical thoughts, leaving you wiser in the end.
October 7, 2024
My Roman History by Alizah Holstein is first and foremost a love story. A love story between Alizah and the ancient city of Rome.
Ever since she was a teenager, Alizah has felt the “call” of Rome. I can relate in that I have felt a “call” to travel the world from a young age but never a specific place for me.
This book shows her jealous love for this amazing city as well as gives us readers its rich history. I have had the pleasure of visiting Rome for one short day and that was obviously not enough time. Casey is luckier than me and has spent a lot more time there! This book makes me want to spend an ample amount of time in Rome and soak up all it has to offer!
If you love to travel or love history then you will want to immerse yourself in this well written memoir. It’s not one that you will want to miss! Thank you @vikingbooks for gifting us this book!🌺🧜🏻♀️
Ever since she was a teenager, Alizah has felt the “call” of Rome. I can relate in that I have felt a “call” to travel the world from a young age but never a specific place for me.
This book shows her jealous love for this amazing city as well as gives us readers its rich history. I have had the pleasure of visiting Rome for one short day and that was obviously not enough time. Casey is luckier than me and has spent a lot more time there! This book makes me want to spend an ample amount of time in Rome and soak up all it has to offer!
If you love to travel or love history then you will want to immerse yourself in this well written memoir. It’s not one that you will want to miss! Thank you @vikingbooks for gifting us this book!🌺🧜🏻♀️
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July 25, 2025read 3/4... a lovely account of life as an undergraduate, then doctoral student of medieval history who is completely enamoured of Rome, and stayed put there several times and writes nostalgically and enticingly of its paths and alleys and archives. A fantastic account of the heartbeat rhythms and catalogue of courses of a life in academia as a dedicated young student, with anecdotes of rooming and romancing, piled high with books and conversations about the past without the encumbering leash of time.
September 8, 2024
My Roman History is a memoir by Aliyah Holstein of her life-long fascination with all things ancient Roman. Her account of the meaningful impact of the ancient culture of Rome on her ongoing personality development is a very interesting read, and investigates the influence of ancient history on one woman’s quest for identity in this sometimes anonymous world. By sharing what has become pivotal for her, she also shares insights that might prove inspiring for many of her readers.
January 7, 2025
The author beautifully weaves her pursuit of an academic career in Medieval History with the history of her beloved Rome and Dante. You can hear the voice of an academic, examining not only the history of Rome but that of herself, questioning, inquisitive, analytical and honest. However, as others have said her true gift is with the written word, as the book is exceptionally well written and captivating from beginning to end. A true gem.
August 4, 2024
I loved this book. I have always enjoyed books about travel and memoirs. While this book is both, it is also so much more. It's the compelling story of a woman finding, and sometimes loosing, her footing on her early life path. Told with vulnerability, intelligence and heart, it keeps you engaged long after you finish the last page.
December 24, 2024
Much of this memoir is very academic in tone but if you love Roman history, or if you're an academic yourself, you'll probably love it.
April 25, 2025
Audiobook
May 5, 2025
3.5 or 4
If you enjoy Greek and Roman classics and also memoirs, you'll probably enjoy this too. It's a little meandering, but has some very lovely writing throughout.
If you enjoy Greek and Roman classics and also memoirs, you'll probably enjoy this too. It's a little meandering, but has some very lovely writing throughout.
July 25, 2024
You don’t have to be an historian of Italy to love this book. The author pulls you into her journey from the first page. She’s just the type of person you’d want next to you on a long voyage, making you ponder a new issue one minute and then laugh the next. I read it in two sittings. I found it captivating enough to read it all without stopping, but I did not want it to end. Her writing is exquisite, and her insights are thought provoking.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews