James Joyce’s sojourn in Rome in 1906-7 is the subject of a recent novel by Giuseppe Cafiero. Here, Cafiero recreates Joyce’s sight-seeing trip to an ancient Jewish burial ground:
[Traveling] along the old Appian Way, [one can] experience a place that Joyce hastened to visit, discovered only in 1859; he had been fascinated by it thanks to some reading [he had done] in Trieste. The Vigna Randanini was (as it still is, even though altered externally by restorations) an ancient Jewish necropolis dating to well before the [nearby] Christian catacombs. Joyce was speechless at the sight of those ruins, recalling the succession of rituals that had marked the place [and] imagining the first settlements when, it is said, the area was sacred to the Jews and it was constructed according to [traditional] dictates, with galleries and narrow tunnels making room for tombs carved into the volcanic rock walls.
Visiting that place even now we can imagine a synagogue, where there is water, where there is the division of spaces into two units (one for men, one for women), where we can deduce the presence of apses. Thus there is a large oblong space preceding an antechamber, then a vestibule as a place of access leading to another room containing a well of about six meters.
Read more on TNT Magazine: http://www.tntmagazine.com/travel/in-the-footsteps-of-james-joyce-in-rome