“A rich portrait of an alluring character with an enviable talent for living .”
~Kirkus Reviews

From the publisher:
A never-before-seen treasure trove of photos and diary entries from celebrated photographer Milton Gendel that bring Rome’s midcentury heyday life.

“I’m just passing through,” Milton Gendel liked to say whenever anybody asked him what he was doing in Rome. Even after seven decades in the Eternal City, from his arrival as a Fulbright Scholar in 1949 until his death in 2018 at the age of ninety-nine, he refused to be pigeonholed. He was always an American—never an “expat,” never an émigré—but he also couldn’t leave, so deep were his ties, and this dual bond left an indelible imprint on his life and art.

Born in New York City to Russian immigrant parents, Gendel first made his way to Meyer Schapiro’s classroom at Columbia University, and from there to Greenwich Village, where he and his friend Robert Motherwell joined the circle of surrealists around Peggy Guggenheim and André Breton. But it was Rome that earned his enduring fascination—the city supplied him with endless outlets for his curiosity, a series of dazzling apartments in palazzi, the great loves of his life, and the scores of friendships that made his story inextricably part of the city’s own, from its postwar impoverishment through the years of il boom, and well into the twenty-first century.

Gendel did much more than just pass through, instead becoming one of Rome’s foremost documentarians. He spoke Italian fluently, worked for the industrialist Adriano Olivetti, and sampled the latest currents of Italian art as a correspondent for ARTnews. And he was an artist in his own right, capturing the lives of Sicilian peasants and British royals alike on film and showing his photographs at the Roman outpost of the Marlborough Gallery. Then there were his diaries, a casement window thrown open onto a who’s who of artists, writers, and socialites sojourning in the city that remained, for Gendel, the Caput Mundi: Mark Rothko, Princess Margaret, Alexander Calder, Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal, Martha Gellhorn, Muriel Spark. His longtime home on the Isola Tiberina was the nerve center of the dolce vita generation, whose comings and goings and doings he immortalized in both words and images.

Here, for the first time in print, are the diaries and photographs of Gendel, selected and edited by Cullen Murphy. Just Passing Through brings together the most striking artifacts of one of the past century’s richest and most expansive lives, salted with wit and insight into the figures who defined an era.

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Reviews

“Gendel grew up to be perhaps the most cultivated person many of your cultivated friends have never heard of. ‘Just Passing Through,’ a new book of his diaries and photographs elegantly edited by Cullen Murphy, the former captain of The Atlantic, thumbs its nose at that careerist New York party question: ‘What do you do?’”
~New York Times, November 6, 2022

“In ‘Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday’ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Cullen Murphy has edited the tell-all diaries of photographer Milton Gendel. In its pages we are plunged into the chic and incestuous Italy of novelist and essayist Gore Vidal (whose house in Rome, Gendel says, is ‘like his work … slick, easy, and sometimes sleazy’), filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, writer Sir Harold Acton, art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and the ultraposh Princess Margaret and Lady Diana Cooper. Gendel’s descriptions can be, appropriately, almost photographic: The painter Balthus, he writes, ‘is like a lizard with a high IQ. Deliberate movements of the head. Quick eye. From the lizard comes slow deliberate speech, which gives even banalities a certain weight or at least measure.’
~Washington Post, December 2, 2022

“As the title suggests, we all just pass through life, but some travelers, for all their ports of call, find a congenial place to put down roots and have the world come to them. Gendel (1918-2018), art critic, photographer, diarist, and socialite, was an exemplar of the kind. Longtime friend Murphy, editor at large at the Atlantic, assembles a selection of the American-born expatriate’s vast diary entries and punctuates them with Gendel’s moody black-and-white photography, producing a retrospective of an age and social strata as well as a man.”
~Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2022

“For many of his nearly 100 years—he died in 2018 just two months shy of the century mark—[Gendel] was perhaps best known for all the people he knew. Relatively late in his life, after several successful exhibitions of his subtle yet witty photographs, he was recognized as a significant artist. Now…. we find out what a capable first-person writer he was, too.”
~Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2022

“Murphy, who met Gendel through the editor Graydon Carter – yet another of the stars in Gendel’s orbit – has produced a small but rich sample of Gendel’s delectable diary and his careful, evocative pictures of his family, friends and adopted city.”
~Apollo Magazine, November 28, 2022

“As Cullen Murphy writes in this book’s illuminating introduction, ‘Milton knew how to listen… he understood how to take a back seat so others felt important… and think several steps ahead.’”
~The Oldie, December 2022

“Milton Gendel had the good fortune to live a wildly entertaining life in Rome—a charmed, romantic period he captured in diaries and photos. Milton had the further good fortune to have Cullen Murphy bring this vanished dolce vita to life.”
~Graydon Carter, coeditor of Air Mail

“I love these diaries. Milton Gendel was the perfect guide to the times in which he lived for nearly one hundred years. He was an insider, but an outsider observing—and he was lucky to know writers, artists, and society figures in London and Rome. From his perceptive analysis of Gore Vidal to his take on Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, I was gripped from the first page.”
~Hugo Vickers, editor of The Quest for Queen Mary

“Milton Gendel was the soul of Rome, and for decades all roads truly did lead to him. He never stopped amazing us with his wit, his knowledge, and his social life (ranging from the local trattoria to Buckingham Palace, with people like Evelyn Waugh tossed in the mix). To fill the void left by his death in 2018, we have the surprise of this gorgeous book. What a gift he left with his diaries and photographs. As someone said to us all those years ago: “You don’t know Milton Gendel? You must meet him.”
~John Guare, playwright, and Adele Chatfield-Taylor, former president and CEO of the American Academy in Rome