In this reading from Satyr Square—an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and Barkan himself—prize-winning scholar and former actor and director Leonard Barkan tells of spending a magical year in Rome. At first hungry, lonely, and uncertain of his intellectual mission, he gradually finds himself the unofficial mascot of an eccentric community of gastronomes, becoming virtually bilingual and falling in love.

Join us for this celebration of a time lived in the quirky intersections between art and life.

Leonard Barkan is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. His interests are Shakespeare and English renaissance literature; Italian renaissance art; medieval and renaissance Italian literature; relations between literature and the visual arts; Latin literature and the survival of antiquity; drama and theater; and food, wine, and the arts. He has been an actor and a director. He is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy, where he writes on the subject of food and wine.

He is currently working on a scholarly study of the relations among words, images, and pleasure from Plato to the Renaissance. He recently won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.