Patricia Vigderman is the author of The Real Life of the Parthenon, Possibilities (essays), and The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Her writing has appeared in Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, The New York Times, Raritan, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She has taught at Tufts University, Harvard University, and from 1989 to 2018 at Kenyon College. Her current project is an exploration of Rome’s endurance and dazzle, of what the artist William Kentridge called its triumphs and laments: a late-life courtship of its precarious and long-lasting beauty.