Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

Anthony Doerr, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, reads his 2007 memoir, Four Seasons in Rome—available on audio for the very first time!

On the day Tony Doerr and his wife returned from the hospital with their newborn twins, he received a letter from the Academy of Arts and Letters informing him that he had won the prestigious Rome Prize, which provides a stipend, an apartment, and a writing studio at the beautiful American Academy for a year. Six months and a few Italian lessons later, they arrived in Rome.

Insatiably curious, an avid reader, and an extraordinary eloquent observer of nature, Doerr sets out to discover Rome. He reads Pliny, Dante, Shelley and visits the churches and piazzas and ancient cisterns they describe. He reads the history of the papacy and attends the vigil as Pope John Paul II lies dying. He takes his twins to the Pantheon in December to wait for snow to fall through the oculus. And he and his family are embraced by the butchers, grocers, and bakers in their little neighborhood on a Roman hill.

For anyone who loves Rome—or wants to know it—this is a gorgeous, informative audiobook. It is also an illuminating account of how a writer transforms experience into sentences, how this writer sees and captures the world.