"Oenophile, gastronome, linguist, literary critic, art maven, and the witty, elegant purveyor of the past and present that is Rome: Leonard Barkan is one of those on whom nothing is lost, and Satyr Square is his brilliant, charming, mouth-watering tale of love and art and wine among the ruins. A sheer delight for mind and heart." -Brenda Wineapple   "It is not enough to report that Barkan has written an enthralling meditation on a life of doomed infatuations and redemptive meals, erotic concealments and scholarly disclosures, foreseen losses and unlooked-for recoveries-has accorded his own life the same precision and principled scrutiny that made his four scholarly works of Renaissance exploration so exceptional. For here he has dug deeper and examined even more searchingly, as the archeology of the modern self requires, and he has thereby produced a brilliant, high-comic revelation of what can be done with a life privileged by ardor, by learning, and-if anything so fresh can be accorded such a labored adjective-by classical judgment. It may be a sin against Intellectual Community to envy what another man can do with his experience, and often without it, but Barkan tempts me terribly, for he has the true Stendhalian brio in all he tells, even in what he pretends not to tell."                                                                 -Richard Howard   "This is a memoir of place and person like no other. An extraordinary excursus into the Renaissance sensibility of Rome, incarnate in an unlikely Jewish-American Virgil- half-scholar, half-satyr-who leads us through labyrinths of archaeology, painting and sculpture, language and gesture, love and lust, and above all food and wine to create a Banquet of the Senses like no other."                                          -Betty Fussell.