When in Rome . . .

A conversation with Scott Samuelson, friend, philosopher, and the author, most recently, of “Rome As a Guide to the Good Life."

Rome’s Flavian Amphitheater, a.k.a. the Colosseum (Sam Valadi via Wikimedia)

By Michael Judge

There’s a scene in Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino‘s 2013 masterpiece “The Great Beauty” where Jep, an aging writer who’s lost his muse, happens upon a giraffe in the heart of Rome—a real giraffe, towering above the Baths of Caracalla like Venus herself. The giraffe isn’t alone. She’s with an old friend of Jep’s, a magician who, astonishingly, makes the giraffe disappear.

The real wonder of the scene is not the giraffe disappearing, but that she appears at all—gently gazing down at Rome and Jep and us, the dumbstruck audience, before vanishing forever. In a 2014 interview, Sorrentino says the giraffe was needed to embody “the mysterious nature of those places of old Rome and the surprise that the city evokes.” Rome, he explains, “is a city where one could have the experience of seeing a magician making a giraffe disappear.” 

Scott Samuelson’s latest book, Rome As a Guide to the Good Life: A Ph…