The Last Of The Valerii

The Last of the Valerii is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1874 and collected in A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales the following year. It is one of his early Italian stories and one of the strangest of his pieces from the 1870s, blending romance, archaeology, and a quietly fantastic element that anticipates his later supernatural stories.

The narrator is an American painter living in Rome who has introduced his young American niece Martha to Count Marco Valerio, the last male descendant of an old Roman aristocratic family. Martha and the Count marry and settle on the family estate just outside Rome. The Valerii family has lived on the same land since classical times and the estate is full of ancient ruins and partially buried antiquities. Soon after the marriage Count Valerio begins excavations on the property and unearths a perfectly preserved marble statue of the goddess Juno.

The statue changes him. Count Valerio, who had been a pleasant ordinary modern Italian, becomes increasingly preoccupied with the statue, spending hours in its presence, gradually neglecting his wife, and showing signs of what the narrator slowly comes to understand is a kind of religious devotion to the rediscovered goddess. The pagan past, buried in the soil for two thousand years, has come back to claim its last hereditary heir. The story works through the slow estrangement between husband and wife and the question of how the household can be saved from what has emerged from the ground.

The story is one of James's earliest pieces using a quasi supernatural element to make a serious point about cultural inheritance. The pagan past is genuinely present in modern Italy in this story, not as superstition but as something that can still reach into the lives of those whose blood carries the old connections. The story is about thirty pages long and works as a single sitting read. It pairs naturally with At Isella and Travelling Companions, his other early Italian stories, and with the later Italian Hours essays where he writes nonfiction about the same country.