You won’t need a plane ticket to see Rome this summer: You’ll find it on Madison Avenue at 36th Street, where the Morgan Library & Museum just unveiled a small but lovely show about Sophia Loren’s hometown.

“City of the Soul: Rome and the Romantics” evokes the Eternal City of more than a century ago. From 1770 to 1870 — the pre-Perillo Tours years — a privileged few made the pilgrimage. Artists, architects, writers, photographers and dreamers were all drawn to its gushing fountains, picture-pretty piazzas and crumbling villas.

And then, of course, there were the ruins — the perfect, Romantic metaphor for mortality. As many visitors then were aware, Britain’s brilliant poet John Keats spent the last three months of his life overlooking the Spanish Steps when he died in Rome in 1821, at age 25.

Drawing from its own collections and loans, the Morgan gives us a mix of paintings, sketches, photos and postcards from some of the brightest lights of the day. Here’s J.M.W. Turner’s watercolor of the interior of St. Peter’s Basilica, the kneeling nun in its foreground dwarfed by its soaring ceiling. Here, too, is a postcard Charles Dickens wrote to his sister-in-law in 1845. The handwriting’s pretty illegible (we’ll have to trust the curator on this), but apparently Dickens was delighted by the Roman Carnival custom of tossing hard bits of confetti at the upper-crust’s coaches.

Even “The Scarlet Letter” writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was seduced by the city’s beauty. There’s a journal entry here detailing a nighttime visit he made to the Trevi Fountain that inspired his gothic romance “The Marble Faun.”

Just outside the gallery, a touch screen puts Rome at your fingertips. Click on the Spanish Steps, Piazza Navona and more, and you’ll see images of them from over a century ago alongside how they look today.

In the Eternal City, at least, beauty is immortal.

“City of the Soul: Rome and the Romantics,” through Sept. 11 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave.; TheMorgan.org.