Paul Hofmann

"Four hundred of the 3,800 people who permanently live or work in the State of Vatican City are women. They are nuns and members of the laity: some are housekeepers of churchmen; others are secretaries, translators, editors, lawyers, and middle-level officials of the papal administration.". "The Vatican's Women recalls women who wielded power in the Vatican, including St. Catherine of Siena, Queen Christina of Sweden, Mother Pascalina (Pope Pius XII's longtime housekeeper and confidante), and Mother Teresa. Paul Hofmann examines the papacy's reaction to Catholic women's (and nuns') liberation, and women's struggles, especially today, to fortify their positions within the Catholic Church."--BOOK JACKET.

No other people over so long a history have shown a greater knack for survival than the Italians. In this wryly affectionate book, Hofmann reveals his adopted countrymen in all their glorious paradoxes, capturing their national essence as no other book has done since Luigi Barzini's More ... classic, The Italians. The national art of arrangement-- dodging taxes, double-dealing, working only as hard as one must-- is counteracted by Italian inventive genius, gusto for life, fierce individuality, deep family bonds (as well as animosities), and a marvelously hedonistic sophistication.

From back cover: From its mythic beginnings as a campsite along a trade route to its emergence as the center of an extensive, powerful empire, ... Saylor's ... novel brings to vivid life the most famous city in the ancient world. Told through the tragedies and triumphs of the descendants of two families, Roma shows the events, the people, and the turning points in history that have come to symbolize ancient Rome in the modern imagination.

In the Seasons of Rome, beloved travel writer Paul Hofmann - a resident of Rome for more than thirty years - delves into the daily life of a city that is in so many ways larger than life. Over the course of a year, his journal navigates beyond the simple images of the tourist board and paints a rich portrait of place, revealing a fetish for Vatican gossip, the comings and goings of the gattare ("cat women" who care for the city's troops of stray felines), and the vagaries of the ever-volatile Roman government. In the eloquent style his readers have come to expect, Hofmann reflects upon the art of being Roman - the arte di arrangiarsi - which Romans themselves define as a knack for "arranging" things, finessing problems, coping with adversity by astute maneuver or simple procrastination, and evading difficulties through ambiguity. Nothing, their philosophy holds, is as serious as it may seem. Hofmann knows his territory, and as he wends his way through the city streets, stopping to chat with mail carriers and construction workers, or lingers over a cappuccino, letting his thoughts wander back into the city's history and half a century of personal experience there, one follows closely behind and listens to the voices of the city - past and present - rise up in his lucid prose. Hofmann speaks from the very heart of Rome.