Robert Graves, I, Claudius, 1934

Claudius unforgettably describes his imperial predecessors, famous and infamous, in Robert Graves's glorious evocation of decadent Ancient Rome.

"Sometimes (Caligula) was Apollo and sometimes Mercury and sometimes Pluto (…) But most of the time he was Jove: he wore an olive-wreath, a beard of fine gold wires, and a bright blue silk cloak, and carried a jagged piece of electrum in his hand to represent lightning. One day he was on the Oration Platform in the Market Place dressed as Jove and making a speech …"
• The Forum, Foro Romano

Alberto Moravia, The Woman of Rome, 1947

Moravia's moving 1947 masterpiece evokes the sexy but squalid street life of Rome , following Adriana who is caught up in the intrigues of criminals and police.

"An amusement park, Luna Park, whose illuminations and music enlivened the summer months. If I looked out sideways from my window I could see the festoons of coloured lamps, the beflagged roofs of the various booths and the crowd packed round the entrance under the branches of the plane trees."
• Luna Park, Via delle Tre Fontane

Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Ragazzi, 1955

The acclaimed director and poet was also a fine novelist, as exemplified here in his story of 12-year-old Riccetto growing up in the notorious slums of Monteverde.

"It's a short way from Monteverde Vecchio to the Granatieri. You go by the Prato, and cut in among the Viale dei Quattro Venti: garbage piles, unfinished houses already in ruins, great muddy excavations, slopes heaped with junk."
• Piazza Donna Olimpia, Monteverde Nuovo

Elsa Morante, History: A Novel, 1974

Morante's brilliant 1974 novel (La storia) tells of Rome during the second world war and follows the lives of Ida Ramundo and her two sons. The book, controversial when published, found a wider following through the 1986 film based on it.

"The ghetto was a small, ancient quarter, segregated – until the last century … Since the old quarter had been made more hygienic and its walls torn down, its population had done nothing but multiply; and now, in those two little squares, thousands of people contrived somehow to live."
• The Jewish Ghetto, Via del Portico d'Ottavia, Sant'Angelo

Giuseppe Genna, Caput Mundi in Rome Noir collection, 2009

Baroque and beautiful Montecitorio is yet a place where danger is never far from the surface in this story from a writer who is a member of the Luther Blissett collective

"Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Chamber of Deputies: the political heart of the nation. The old, yellowish Baroque building, which the genius Bernini distilled from an incubus of the imagination, twisting and bending the forms in dizzying abysses, complicating the internal labyrinths, widening the staircases"
• Palazzo Montecitorio, Via del Corso

Ennio Flaiano, Via Veneto Papers, from Rome Tales, stories translated by Hugh Shankland, 2011

The journal of Fellini's co-writer, one of a number of excellent authors included in the evocative Rome Tales, offers some fascinating insights on the director and Roman life.

"Fellini never stops thinking about [La Dolce Vita] and spends his time picking out faces, contacting actors, sending telegrams, getting to know the shady hangers-on of Via Veneto and environs. He wants to depict an unreal Rome, rebuild everything in the studio or leave to reality what is unreal already: the Trevi Fountain, St Peter's, the Roman countryside."
• Via Veneto

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey 1786-1788

As he travelled to Rome and other Italian cities, Goethe wrote many letters which for their wonderful Roman observations remain unsurpassed.

"We came to the Colosseum at twilight. Once one has seen it, everything seems small. It is so huge that the mind cannot retain its image; one remembers it as smaller than it is, so that every time one returns to it, one is astounded by its size."
• The Colosseum, Piazza del Colosseo

Lindsey Davis, The Silver Pigs, 2000

Marcus Didiua Falco thinks he's rescuing a girl in distress but all is not what is seems in Ancient Rome's winding back alleys.

"It was the usual scene in the Forum. We had the Record Office and the Capitol Hill hard above us on the left … Opposite, beyond the white marble rostrum, stood the Senate House. All the porticos were crammed with butchers and bankers."
• The Capitol, Piazza Campidoglio, 55

Tennessee Williams, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, 1950

Middle-aged widow Karen Stone arrives in a seductive postwar Rome where love and betrayal seem to lurk on every corner.

"Domes of ancient churches … still bathed in gold light, and so did the very height of that immense cascade of stone stairs that descended from the Trinità di Monte to the Piazza di Spagna. All day that prodigally spreading fountain of stairs had collected the sun-crouching multitude of persons who had no regular or legitimate occupation."
• Spanish Steps, Via dei Condotti

Livy, The Early History of Rome

In the first five volumes of his epic Roman history Livy gives us a ringside seat through the reign of seven kings, the republic and civil strife.

"It was on this occasion that our Circus Maximus was originally planned. On the ground marked out for it special places were assigned to senators … Horses and boxers, mostly from Etruria, provided the entertainment. From then onwards, the games became an annual institution and were called the Roman, or Greek, games."
• Circus Maximus, Via del Circo Massimo

Malcolm Burgess is the publisher of the Oxygen Books city-pick series, featuring some of the best-ever writing on favourite world cities