A decade ago, Princeton professor Leonard Barkan spent time in Rome for a book about ancient sculpture. The academic revisited that year in a more personal way in his book Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24). "I got to Rome and didn't know a single human being," says Barkan. "I very easily could have been utterly solitary. My Italian at that point was not so very good. At the end of that year, I had a farewell party with 45 people. It was a year in which I had to invent a new life - and succeeded."

How did you reconstruct that year? I had written a lot of letters that year. So I had this wad of writing that already was the kind of writing I was trying to do. In the end, it was interesting how very little of those letters came into the book. I never wrote a single word of it in Rome. I always seemed to be writing it in America. That partly informs the kind of book it is. The story is very much recollected and remembered, reinterpreted. [I] discovered … that memory is like other faculties; it really gets better if you exercise it. I discovered when I had some sort of cue, whether it was a picture or something I had said in a letter, I would have extraordinary memory discoveries of things that had happened to me.

What does a year mean to you? If you're an academic, it's overwhelmingly characteristic to measure one's life in years. It's now interesting, being back in Rome and talking to many of the people who are in the book, that they don't remember what year it was that we all met; hardly any of them can remember. To a person, they think it was longer ago than it was. But I always remember what year things happen because I have this academic calendar. I never left school. The year is a very powerful marker to me.