Ecco Roma!

ROME AND A VILLA (315 pp.]--Eleanor Clark--Doubleday ($4).

Aeneas never wrote a book about Rome, but hosts of subsequent travelers have more than repaired the oversight. The latest of the books about Rome is by a novelist named Eleanor Clark, and it is well worth reading. Traveler Clark saunters around Rome with her senses peeled, and lets the city work on her.

"Ecco Roma!" is her invocation. "A city of bells and hills and walls; of many trees nordic and tropical together, pine, ilex, and palm, and water and a disturbing depth of shadows; of acres of ruins, some handsome, some shabby lumps and dumps of useless masonry, sprinkled through acres of howling modernity--an impossible compounding of time, in which no century has respect for any other and all hit you in a jumble at every turn."

Flashing neon lights surround Bernini's 17th century Triton fountain. A "surgical incision" in the side of a spandy new apartment house preserves an antique pillar. The Forum, "that lovely lake of time," is lit up at night like a model house. "The place is crawling with wires." Yet despite all this "enormity of the specific"--or perhaps directly through it--Rome makes its power felt in the beholder. "The city has its own language in time, its own vocabulary for the eye, for which nothing else was any preparation ... It is ... a vast untidiness peopled with characters and symbols so profound they join the imagery of your own dreams . . . Rome is everybody's memory."

Author Clark includes a good many descriptions of Roman churches ("It is all physical and close; God is not up in any Gothic shadows . . . The Anglo-Saxon, hunting everywhere for French cathedrals, feels his mind threatened like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea"). She also has a lot to say about the modern Romans ("Their voices carry like rockets .. . An American ... feels exposed . .."). And she tries very hard to evoke the past in her description of Hadrian's ruined villa at Tivoli.

In sum, Rome and, a Villa is a brilliant piece of traveler's impressionism, written with verbal polish. Though it will mean more to people who have visited Rome, the book can still excite those who have not; it summons up, like a good translation, the spirit of the original.

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