A young American enters the secretive world of Rome’s fading aristocracy and discovers a society haunted by lost power, forbidden desire, and the approach of a modern age it cannot understand.
Samuele, an American student living in Rome after the First World War, becomes acquainted with a private circle of nobles, churchmen, artists, and expatriates known as the Cabala. At its center are figures whose wealth, beauty, rank, and influence belong to an older Europe now slipping into decline. Drawn into their rivalries and intimate histories, Samuele observes lives shaped by frustrated love, religious conflict, political change, and the burden of inherited privilege.
The members of the Cabala appear glamorous and powerful, yet each is isolated by memory, pride, or desire. As their stories unfold, Wilder blends social comedy, tragedy, mythology, and philosophical reflection. Ancient gods and modern men seem to overlap in a Rome where ruins, ceremonies, salons, and private scandals reveal a civilization suspended between its magnificent past and an uncertain future.
First published in 1926, The Cabala was Thornton Wilder’s first novel and drew upon his own experiences at the American Academy in Rome. This semi-autobiographical work introduced many of the themes that would shape his later writing: the persistence of the past, the mystery of human connection, the role of fate, and the search for meaning within apparently ordinary lives. It will appeal to readers of literary fiction, expatriate novels, historical fiction, and atmospheric portraits of postwar Europe.
