“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, 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.

Though he was born in New York City, it was Rome that earned Gendel’s enduring fascination-the 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 city’s own. His diaries and photographs are a casement window thrown open onto a who’s who of artists, writers, and socialites sojourning in the city: Mark Rothko, Princess Margaret, Alexander Calder, Anaïs 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 Gendel’s 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 century’s richest and most expansive lives, salted with wit and insight into the figures who defined an era.

Author Biography

Milton Gendel (1918-2018) was an American photographer and art critic who lived and worked in Rome. He studied at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army in China before winning a Fulbright Scholarship and moving to Italy, where he worked as a correspondent for ARTnews. His photographs have been shown in numerous galleries in Italy and elsewhere abroad.

Cullen Murphy is an editor at large at The Atlantic, where he was the longtime managing editor, and he has also been an editor at large at Vanity Fair. He is the author of Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe (FSG, 2017) and is at work on a book on the fountains of Rome.

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