The Marco Chonicles

By Elizabeth Geoghegan

In this hilarious, irreverent, flash memoir, a young American expat arrives in Rome to find handsome, charming men, breathtakingly beautiful antiquities, and perfectly made cappuccino. What more could anyone want? But after a few too many romantic mishaps, she discovers the so-called dolce vita comes at a price. With a jaded eye, but a vulnerable heart, short story writer Elizabeth Geoghegan takes us on a literary Sex in the City romp through Rome. The Marco Chronicles shows us what life in Italy looks like when you' re 30-something, running from grief, and trying to find a way back to love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781951631284

Elizabeth Geoghegan

Elizabeth Geoghegan is the author of Natural Disasters: Stories and The Marco Chronicles: To Rome Without Love, a Kindlebestseller, winner of the Travelers' Tales Solas Gold Prize for Memoir, and selected for The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10. Most recently, her essay about her friend and mentor, "Smoking with Lucia Berlin," was among The Paris Review's "Best of 2015." Geoghegan earned her MFA in Fiction from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and her MA in Creative Writing from The University of Colorado at Boulder. She lives in Rome.

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Copyright © Elizabeth Geoghegan 2023

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If Rome were a woman, she’d be a whore. The kind of whore who looks good from a distance or in just the right light. And while you are busy ogling her cupolas, she will deftly slip the wallet from your back pocket. She will deceive you and she will seduce you and she will be so intoxicating you will have a hard time letting her go.

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My anti-relationship with the Eternal City began by accident. I never burned for Italy the way so many others do. I never imagined idyllic afternoons, lolling supine beneath a vine-strung pergola, chatting in a foreign tongue to new friends. And I never bought into all those stories about the irresistible charm and sexual dynamism of that mythical creature, the Italian male.

Instead, more than 20 years ago, a friend invited me on what was literally her dream holiday, not mine. She planned every detail, researched every facet. I never so much as glanced at a guidebook. But we both knew I needed that trip even more than she did. Staggered by the recent death of my brother, I landed in Italy and proceeded to ignore the place along with everything I was feeling. Then, one afternoon, alone in a café near the San Lorenzo market in Florence, I met a beautiful—and it must be mentioned—non-Italian man who invited me to a dinner party in Fiesole, a village along a winding road, high above the city, the house just a stone’s throw from the birthplace of Galileo.

That gathering became the eventual memory upon which I would later impulsively quit my job,