© Stathis Orphanos.

Gore Vidal, who died at his home in the Hollywood Hills on Tuesday at 86, was always perturbed when the press referred to him as an expatriate. Vidal spent most of every year, starting in the early 1960s, in Rome, and later between Rome and a grand villa, La Rondinaia (the swallow’s nest), in the Amalfi Coast village of Ravello. He preferred to think of his position in Southern Italy as a perch from which to observe his country. I think the scores of novels, essays, and plays he wrote about the United States prove that the distance gave him great perspective on what he variously referred to as the United States of Amnesia and “my only subject.” Federico Fellini, whom Vidal befriended in Rome—Vidal appeared as himself in Roma and wrote a draft of Fellini’s Casanova—said that Gorino, as Fellini called him, had “gone native” in Italy. Vidal rejected that pronouncement as well, and, indeed, his grasp of the Italian language was always rudimentary at best, in keeping with the much-preferred role of American Icon Abroad, which he played in the manner of the movie stars who frolicked together on the Via Veneto at the time of La Dolce Vita. (I imagine he thought of himself as possessing the star power of an Elizabeth Taylor trapped in the body of a Burt Lancaster.)

Vidal settled in Rome in order to be able to work at the library of the American Academy, where he researched Julian (1964), his return to the novel, after years of writing for Broadway, television, and movies and an unsuccessful run for Congress, in 1960, from a district in Dutchess County, New York. His novel-writing career had been torpedoed by the New York Times book critic Orville Prescott, who refused to review—or even read, he told Vidal’s editor at E. P. Dutton—any of Vidal’s books following The City and the Pillar (1948), one of the first works of fiction in the English language with an explicitly homosexual theme. Rome was, in a sense, the reset button for Vidal’s career. He was celebrated for Broadway hits (Visit to a Small Planet and The Best Man), and he had made a small fortune writing for movies (Suddenly Last Summer, Ben Hur) and TV, but he was confident that he was a novelist above all. Julian, a huge best-seller, proved him right. His next book, written in Rome, was Washington, D.C. (1967), the first of what would become the immensely popular Narratives of Empire, his seven-volume American historical series, written over 33 years.