One of Vanity Fairs Best Books of 2022

Milton Gendel had the good fortune to live a wildly entertaining life in Romea 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 Mail

A never-before-seen treasure trove of photos and diary entries from the celebrated photographer Milton Gendel that bring Romes midcentury heyday to life.

Im 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 Americannever an expat, never an migrbut he couldnt 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 Meyer Schapiros classroom at Columbia University and then to Greenwich Village, where he and his friend Robert Motherwell joined the circle of surrealists around Peggy Guggenheim and Andr Breton. But it was Rome that earned his enduring fascinationthe city supplied him with endless outlets for his curiosity, a series of dazzling apartments in palazzi, the great loves of his life, and the scores of friendships that made his story inextricably part of the citys own.

Gendel did much more than just pass through, instead becoming one of Romes foremost documentarians. He spoke Italian fluently, worked for the industrialist Adriano Olivetti, and sampled the latest currents of Italian art as a correspondent for ARTnews. And he was an artist in his own right, capturing the lives of Sicilian peasants and British royals alike on film and showing his photographs at the Roman outpost of the Marlborough Gallery. Then there were his diaries, a casement window thrown open onto a whos who of artists, writers, and socialites sojourning in the city that remained, for Gendel, the Caput Mundi: Mark Rothko, Princess Margaret, Alexander Calder, Anas Nin, Gore Vidal, Martha Gellhorn, Muriel Spark. His longtime home on the Isola Tiberina was the nerve center of the dolce vita generation, whose comings and goings and doings he immortalized in both words and images.

Here, for the first time in print, are Gendels diaries, together with his photographs, selected and edited by Cullen Murphy. Just Passing Through brings together the most striking artifacts of one of the past centurys richest and most expansive lives, salted with wit and insight into the figures who defined an era.

Includes black-and-white photographs