In 1956, the twenty-eight-year-old William Klein arrived in Rome to assist Federico Fellini on Nights of Cabiria. A delay in filming opened the city to another kind of production: Klein walked its streets with Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, and other figures from Italy’s avant-garde as his guides. The photographs that emerged became Rome, first published in 1959—a visual diary shaped by encounter, movement, and the particular cultural company in which Klein discovered the city.

The book approaches Rome neither as a catalogue of monuments nor as a detached travel record. Its foundation is the street, while its extended captions and literary excerpts make reading integral to looking. Observations by Stendhal, Jules Michelet, Mark Twain, Henry James, and others enter into dialogue with Klein’s photographs, multiplying the perspectives from which the city can be understood. Rome appears here as both a lived environment and an accumulated field of representations, observed by a photographer alert to everyday Italians as well as the city’s public image.

Published by Aperture in 2009, Rome + Klein is a revised and expanded return to that earlier work and the first Aperture edition. It adds previously unseen fashion photographs made by Klein in Rome, together with new and updated writing by the photographer. These additions matter because they place his street work, commissioned image-making, and retrospective voice within the same account of the city, extending the book without separating it from its original historical moment.

The hardcover publication comprises 224 pages arranged as a two-volume set in a plastic slipcase. For a serious photobook collection, its interest lies not in unsupported claims of scarcity but in the opportunity to examine a landmark urban project through an expanded editorial form. The combination of photographs, captions, borrowed voices, later text, and newly included fashion work makes this edition especially useful for considering how a photographic book can be revisited—and how Klein constructed Rome through both images and language.