Photo: Matteo Nardone/Pacific Press/AlamyWhat does it mean to be “a Roman” in the 21st century? But the narrator of the last story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection “Roman Stories” has a personal stake in this question. She is an American professor in her 50s who was pulled to Rome as a young woman by a fascination with the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (whose name provides the story’s title). After marrying a Roman, she ended up staying in the city for decades. At her mother-in-law’s funeral, she wonders: Had her long residence made her a Roman?

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Persons: Matteo Nardone, Virgil, Aeneas, Caesar, Mussolini, Fellini, Sophia Loren, ”, Dante Alighieri, she’d, “ Organizations: Pacific Press Locations: American, Rome, Italian, America