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[MyDaily = Reporter Lee Ji-hye] Travel writer Shin Yang-ran has just released the travel essay Shameless Rome.
She’s best known for the I Want to Go guidebook series — detailed city guides to Barcelona, Granada, Florence, Athens & Santorini, St. Petersburg, Moscow and Vienna — but for this new title she chose a different approach.
Travel books usually fall into two camps: practical, on-the-ground guidebooks packed with facts, and travel essays that weave personal impressions and moods.
Shin’s Shameless Rome doesn’t attempt a room-by-room catalog of the city. Instead, she focuses on what she thinks makes Rome irresistible. It doesn’t pretend to be the ultimate guidebook; rather, it’s the perfect primer to help readers take their first step into Rome’s deeper layers.
On paper it can look like a guide. The first route, “The Heart of Ancient Rome,” starts at the Colosseum and leads through the Roman Forum, Palatine Hill and the Imperial Forums, ending at the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument and Capitoline Hill. The second route, “Encountering Modern Rome,” begins at Piazza del Popolo — the historic finish line of the Grand Tour — and carries you on to the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon and Piazza Navona.
Where the book really shines is its storytelling, not route efficiency. Shin captures the traveler’s instinctive thrill when crowds gather at the Colosseum — that instant of, “Ah, this is Rome” — and teaches readers to see with the mind’s eye when confronted by the Roman Forum’s broken stones and scattered foundations. In front of Caesar’s temple she points out the bitter irony of a republic that ended up inviting an emperor. At the Temple of Juno Moneta, she traces how the word “money” has its roots there. Dry history is rendered vivid and alive.
Use this book as your pre-trip homework, then bring it along while you’re there. Standing at the Trevi Fountain — wary of pickpockets but still letting out a genuine “wow” — the stories and history you read will fold into that moment and make the experience richer. Knowing the background changes how the Pantheon’s majesty hits you and reveals the Baroque brilliance behind Piazza Navona’s fountains.
It’s useful whether this is your first trip to Europe or a return visit to Rome. True to its subtitle, “A Topic With a Thousand Drawbacks!,” Shin doesn’t hide Rome’s clear flaws — pickpockets, trash, graffiti and relentless crowds. At the same time, she persuasively argues that Rome is a treasure chest overflowing with sights that more than compensate for its problems.
Shin smiled and said, “The I Want to Go series dives into every detail, and Rome could have filled several volumes if I tried to do the same. Even the churches could each be books on their own, so I had to leave many out of Shameless Rome.”
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