As part of a volume devoted to the relations between the United States and Italy, this essay investigates the ways in which the city of Rome was portrayed by Francis Marion Crawford (1854-1909) and Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894), two American writers who, now regarded as minor, enjoyed in their time a wide and loyal readership. Recreating in their writings Rome as they saw it in its early years as the capital of Italy, Crawford and Woolson captured its difficult balancing act, precariously positioned as it was between the past and the present, antiquity and modernity, tradition and change.
