Olivia Laing is out with their latest, The Silver Book (FSG), a queer love story and noirish thriller set in the world of Italian cinema in the 1970s. “I wrote The Silver Book while living in Rome, immersing myself in the city and trying to time-travel back to 1975, when the film directors Pasolini and Fellini walked the streets,” Laing explains via e-mail. “I wrote it in a feverish two-and-a-half months, charged up on the city’s wild energy.” It is about (real) Academy Award–winning costume designer Danilo Donati and a (fictional) English artist, Nicholas, who becomes his apprentice and lover. Readers see the two at work on sets and wardrobe for Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò,” against the backdrop of legendary film studio Cinecittà in Rome–and Pasolini’s murder in 1975. It is, Laing posted on Instagram, “an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, sex and power.”
It isn’t Laing’s first book set in the Boot. Their novel, Rawwas inspired by a trip to Val d’Orcia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Tuscany. Laing may have been a temporary resident of the Eternal City, but that did not prevent the author from developing a set of favorite haunts. “Rome is the ultimate as well as the eternal city. Everything happened here,” Laing tells Vogue. “It’s beautiful beyond reason and changes your relationship to time.”
Hotel: I stay at the British School at Romewhich is basically like living in a Muriel Spark novel circa 1955.
Restaurant: Roman dishbut it’s hardcore Roman-style. Be prepared for a very no-frills rabbit.
Breakfast: Get a cornetto and cappuccino at Canova and pretend you’re Fellini. The waiters probably won’t make such a fuss of you, but you’re in Piazza del Popolo so what do you care?
Caffeine fix: It’s Rome, you can have coffee literally anywhere. Please stand up.
Dessert: Blackberry gelato at Giolittia classic for a reason. Yes, you want panna.
Best dish: Roman-style Puntarellebitter greens tossed in anchovy, a dream in grey and rainy January.
Shop I’m obsessed with: Schostalfor socks and especially delicious stripy cotton men’s boxer shorts, my summer uniform.
Bust of Fulcieri Paulucci by Calboli in the Villa BorghesePhoto: John Greim/Getty Images