TOW #12 - IRB: Four Seasons in Rome

Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr is not a simple and generic tale about the love of a romantic city. It as about his growth with Rome, his discovery of the city and then a discovery of himself. Anthony Doerr was chosen by an Academy in Rome to have a fellowship to live on Rome in a year. He wanted to describe his experience in the city and how he grew here by writing Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr used powerful imagery and deep anecdotes in order to show how powerful the city of Rome is and how it transformed him as the person. "It tastes like nutmeg and brine and cream; we eat slices as if it were cake" (Doerr 39). His culinary tastes grew in Italy, as well as the rest of him, too. The experiences he has illustrate the changes in his lifestyle, how the beauty of Rome transformed him as a person. This illustration showed how powerful the experience was for him, and how deeply it affected his existence in no other way other rhetoric will not. Doerr also used anecdotes to show how he grows too. When he describes how he adjusts to the age of the city, "The oldest building in Idaho... built by... 1853... The oldest building in Rome with its original roof still intact is the Pantheon... by the emperor Hadrian around AD 125" (56-57). When explaining how he ponders the descriptions of time, he juxstaposes the age of the Pantheon with the oldest building in Idaho, adeptly showing how the definition of our time is so brief without truly saying it, and this shows the reader how Rome changes one's opinion about the world. He says what he wants to say through experiences, not by the words that we typically do. That is the power of imagery and anecdotes.