Is there an audiobook of Four Seasons in Rome?

Yes. Four Seasons in Rome has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Anthony Doerr.

Is Four Seasons in Rome on Kindle Unlimited?

No. Four Seasons in Rome was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 19, 2026.

Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr book cover for the Book of the Day memoir book review

Our score

4.2/ 5

Excellent

Listen to Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDJune 2007

Genres

Non-Fiction Memoir Travel

Themes

Attention and noticing under exhaustionNew fatherhood colliding with a scholarly ambitionRome's daily rhythms versus its monumentsWriting about the difficulty of writing

Four Seasons in RomeOn Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

Name: Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
Price: 1.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr spends a Rome Prize year chasing Pliny, Keats, and a dying pope through the city's back alleys while his newborn twins scream through the night, and the result is a memoir about attention as much as about Italy.

The Review

Our take

The dying pope arrives early. John Paul II is failing a few blocks from the apartment Doerr and his wife have just moved into with six-month-old twins, and for weeks the neighborhood fills with pilgrims, candles, and the low hum of a city waiting for a death. Doerr doesn't treat it as spectacle. He treats it as one more thing happening in Rome while he is also trying to keep two infants alive on no sleep, and that collision, the sacred and the utterly mundane sharing a street, sets the register for the whole book.

He won the Rome Prize the same day he brought his sons home from the hospital, and Four Seasons in Rome runs on that whiplash. A year meant for scholarly wandering, cisterns, Dante, the Pantheon's oculus, gets rerouted through formula schedules and stroller logistics on cobblestones that were never built for wheels. Doerr keeps a naturalist's eye even at his most exhausted. He notices which butcher argues with him in slow, patient Italian, which grocer slips the twins extra fruit, how a fountain sounds different at four in the morning than at noon. The prose has the compressed, image-first quality of his fiction: a paragraph will orbit a single detail, a swallow's nest, a shard of ancient brick, until it opens into something larger about memory or fatherhood.

What keeps this from being a standard expat-year memoir is how honestly Doerr writes about not writing. He came to Rome with a novel to finish and spends much of the book confessing how little of it gets done, how the city keeps interrupting him with something worth watching instead. Readers expecting a tidy arc, obstacle to triumph, might find the structure loose. It's built more like a year of index cards than a plotted narrative, entries that circle back to the same streets and same worries about whether he's paying close enough attention to his own life while it happens. That looseness is the point. He's writing about the impossibility of fully noticing anything while sleep-deprived and responsible for two other humans, and the book's shape mirrors the fractured, associative way he actually experienced the year.

Why you should read

Fans of Doerr's image-dense prose style
Readers who like memoir built from small observed moments
Anyone who has tried to work through new-parent exhaustion
Travel writing that resists tourist-brochure Rome

What to expect

Loose, associative structure rather than a plotted arc
Short chapters that circle the same streets and worries
Dense, specific sensory detail in short bursts
Domestic exhaustion woven through the travel writing

By the final chapters, when the family prepares to leave, the accumulation of small Roman details has become its own kind of argument for slowing down. Doerr never oversells the wisdom he's gained. He just keeps handing you the specific: the weight of a stroller on stone, the particular blue of a December sky over the Pantheon's open roof, snow falling straight through it onto two toddlers who won't remember any of it. The book ends up less about Rome than about what it takes to actually see a place, or a child, while you still can.

Reviewed by Ellis · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.2/ 5

Excellent

Listen to Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of Four Seasons in Rome?: Yes. Four Seasons in Rome has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Anthony Doerr.
Listen to Four Seasons in Rome free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
Is Four Seasons in Rome on Kindle Unlimited?: No. Four Seasons in Rome was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 19, 2026.

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Common questions

What is Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World about?: The dying pope arrives early. John Paul II is failing a few blocks from the apartment Doerr and his wife have just moved into with six-month-old twins, and for weeks the neighborhood fills with pilgrims, candles, and the low hum of a city waiting for a death. Doerr doesn't treat it as spectacle…
Is Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World worth reading?: We scored Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World 4.2 out of 5. Anthony Doerr spends a Rome Prize year chasing Pliny, Keats, and a dying pope through the city's back alleys while his newborn twins scream through the night, and the result is a memoir about attention as much as about Italy.