Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday: The Diaries and Photographs of Milton Gendel

One of Vanity Fair’s Best Books of 2022“Milton Gendel had the good fortune to live a wildly entertaining life in Rome―a charmed, romantic period he captured in diaries and photos. Milton had the further good fortune to have Cullen Murphy bring this vanished dolce vita to life.” ―Graydon Carter, coeditor of Air MailA never-before-seen treasure trove of photos and diary entries from the celebrated photographer Milton Gendel that bring Rome’s midcentury heyday to life.“I’m just passing through,” Milton Gendel liked to say whenever anybody asked him what he was doing in Rome. Even after seven decades in the Eternal City, from his arrival as a Fulbright Scholar in 1949 until his death in 2018 at the age of ninety-nine, he refused to be pigeonholed. He was always an American―never an “expat,” never an émigré―but he couldn’t leave, so deep were his ties, and this dual bond left an indelible imprint on his life and art.Born in New York City to Russian immigrants, Gendel first made his way to M