Lindy Stiebel recently spent a week in Rome at the invitation of the Universita Roma Tre. The ‘official’ business was to lecture on Rider Haggard and his time in South Africa (see the Rider Haggard Trail); unofficially she was a literary tourist in this very ‘writerly’ city. The surprise? There is only one organised literary trail you can go on – the Dan Brown ‘Angels and Demons’ tour (see www.viator.com for details). This is a 4 hour walking tour of Rome which tracks clues from the novel through St Maria del Popolo church, St Peter’s Square, St Maria della Vittoria Church, Piazza Navona and Castel Sant’Angelo. Nineteen literary pilgrims turned up on the day Lindy joined in – mostly readers from the US and UK who were eager to pick up the clues. Carina, the German tour guide, says the tours, which run twice a week, have been very popular. Apart from that dedicated trail , there’s lots to visit if you’re interested in the Romantic poets – the Keats/Shelley Museum, Babingtons’ Tea Room and Cafe Greco near the Spanish Steps where various writers took their tea or coffee, and the Protestant Cemetery in via Caio Cestio where Keats, Shelley, Goethe’s son, Robert Ballantyne (The Coral Island), and Axel Munthe (The Story of San Michele) among other writers are buried.
