In 1959, the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen came to Rome as a writer-in-residence at the American Academy. Her book about her year here – called, simply, A Time in Rome – was published in 1960, but largely forgotten until its republication by Vintage in 2010. Yet this exquisite account of her travels around the city is remarkable not only for the beauty of its prose, or for its witty and perceptive observations on Roman life, but also for offering a very different take on the Empress Livia. It is this Livia that I have been trying to track down during my own ‘time in Rome’, as I retrace Bowen’s footsteps around the city.

Bowen describes going with a friend to Livia’s villa on the Via Flaminia, on the outskirts of Rome – ‘two women paying a morning call on a third’. When I make a similar visit with my mother, the third woman is, alas, not at home – her villa is shut for restoration. We can hear among the pines, though, the rumble of traffic that Bowen heard, as she mused on how living so close to the Via Flaminia must ‘have been like living over a main railway-line’. Bowen’s Rome is a city of the senses, of sound, smell, colour and light. Following her to the Museo Nazionale, where the famous ‘garden of Livia’ fresco from her villa is now housed, I notice with Bowen ‘the veining of leaves, corollas’ uneven or dinted petals, the moulded, tipped and directed feathers composing the characteristic plumage of each bird’. The brushwork seems effortless – although, as I find when I join a fresco workshop back at the BSR, it is more difficult than it looks!

Bowen imagines Livia siting in her villa, head in her hands, caught between the demands of her son Tiberius and her husband Augustus, dreaming of the ‘Elsewhere’ of an enchanted garden. Of course, this empathetic depiction of Livia is pure imagination – the concoction of a novelist. But why should it not be? Graves was likewise a novelist, and, while he boasted of his close reliance on writers like Tacitus, we must remember that ancient historians were in many ways closer to historical novelists than what we would consider rigorous historical scholarship – particularly when it comes to their portrayals of powerful women.

As part of her imaginative interpretation, Bowen links Livia to another powerful woman – the empress Joséphine, wife of Napoleon. Looking round Rome’s Napoleonic museum, I can see the resemblance. In my PhD, I explored how Augustus used images of his family in public artwork, and women and children are equally prominent in the Napoleonic museum. Both men strove to refashion republics into new, hereditary dynasties – and, as Bowen rightly observes, both struggled, for neither Livia nor Joséphine had children by their imperial husbands.