Rome in 545, between the Goths and Byzantium: a young Roman noble, a Gothic girl, a deacon with a policy, and a city being fought over by people who no longer remember what it was. Gissing spent years on the sources for this and died before finishing it; his friend Frederic Harrison saw it into print with the last chapters missing. It is nothing like the rest of his work, and the dying Rome in it is the best thing he ever built. Sixty plates of street life, camp, and cavalry by painters including Boldini and De Nittis carry the noise of the late city into Gissing's dying Rome.
