The Italian Job : A Memoir of an American Reporter in Rome

When readers first meet Jason Horowitz in The Italian Job: A Memoir of an American Reporter in Rome, his family vacation is in tatters. Pope Francis has died, and the journalist has been called back to Rome, which means he must leave the home of his in-laws in the coastal community of Maremma. “This was the Tuscan paradise,” he writes, “where our children, once small and now not so small, helped their grandmother pluck dark eggplants and gleaming tomatoes from the garden, where each morning they watched their grandfather raise the tricolor Italian flag.” The night before the premature end of their vacation, Horowitz dreamed of the pope’s death. Was it a premonition? he asks his wife when he receives the news. “Of course not,” she replies, “it’s just that you’re always thinking about the pope.” This is an early hint that The Italian Job, for all its jeweled observations of Italian life and landscapes, won’t strike quite the cozy, pastoral note of Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun or Martha Cooley’s My Little Donkey. As the title suggests, Horowitz’s Italian days do involve a job, primarily as the Rome bureau chief for the New York Times. Landing in Italy, he writes, “was no vacation; in fact, now I would never be off duty.” Even so, Horowitz manages to have some fun, much of it while he’s on the beat. Like A.J. Liebling, the legendary New Yorker writer whose puckish humor enlivened his dispatches from France, Horowitz excels at the comically subversive touch. Noting a visit to Rome by the absurdly grandiose Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, Horowitz recalls the strongman’s bodyguards, “a female troupe that reminded me of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.” Horowitz brings an equally sharp eye to his coverage of Vatican politics, chronicling papal succession contests that bear more than a passing resemblance to Conclave. Despite its often wry sensibility, The Italian Job offers serious reflection, too. In covering controversial Italian leaders such as Silvio Berlusconi and Giorgia Meloni, Horowitz sees parallels with the polarized political climate back in America. But he finds hope in Italy’s capacity for renewal in spite of—or perhaps because of—its antiquity. Italy, he discovers, is a place that “could be founded and refounded, born and then reborn over and over.” Horowitz has had his own rebirth in his overseas post. He’s now a foreign correspondent in Madrid, and if The Italian Job is any indication, his Spanish adventures will make a promising sequel.