Rome
An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present

This is the first urban history of Rome to span its entire three-thousand-year history.

Rabun Taylor (Author), Katherine Wentworth Rinne (Author), Spiro Kostof (Author)

9781107601499, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 September 2016

450 pages, 216 b/w illus. 12 maps
25.4 x 17.7 x 2 cm, 0.94 kg

'… this volume will be useful for scholars from many sub-fields looking to situate their work in the city's own history. … But the value of the large-scale urban biography model is precisely to make us think about patterns in the city's life over time. This book achieves its aims admirably, and will be valuable for students and researchers alike.' Amy Russell, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Spanning the entire history of the city of Rome from Iron Age village to modern metropolis, this is the first book to take the long view of the Eternal City as an urban organism. Three thousand years old and counting, Rome has thrived almost from the start on self-reference, supplementing the everyday concerns of urban management and planning by projecting its own past onto the city of the moment. This is a study of the urban processes by which Rome's people and leaders, both as custodians of its illustrious past and as agents of its expansive power, have shaped and conditioned its urban fabric by manipulating geography and organizing space; planning infrastructure; designing and presiding over mythmaking, ritual, and stagecraft; controlling resident and transient populations; and exploiting Rome's standing as a seat of global power and a religious capital.

1. A bend in the river
2. A storybook beginning
3. Ideological crossfire
4. Big men on the campus
5. Res publica restitute
6. Memorials in motion: spectacle in the city
7. The concrete style
8. Remaking Rome's public core I
9. Remaking Rome's public core II
10. Continuity and crisis
11. Rus in urbe: a garden city
12. Administration, infrastructure, and disposal of the dead
13. Mapping, zoning, and sequestration
14. Tetrarchic and Constantinian Rome
15. Trophies and tituli: Christian infrastructure before Constantine
16. Walls make Christians: from fourth to fifth century
17. A tale of two Romes
18. The Rome of Goths and Byzantines
19. Christian foundations
20. From Domus laterani to Romanum palatium
21. The Leonine City: St Peter's and the Borgo
22. Via Papalis, the Christian decumanus
23. The urban theaters of imperium and SPQR
24. Housing daily life
25. Chaos in the fortified city
26. The Tiber River
27. Humanist Rome, absolutist Rome (1420–1527)
28. Planning Counter-Reformation Rome
29. Processions and populations
30. Magnificent palaces and rhetorical churches
31. Neoclassical Rome
32. Picturing Rome
33. Revolution and Risorgimento
34. Italian nationalism and romanità
35. A city turned inside out.

Subject Areas: Classical Greek & Roman archaeology [HDDK], Archaeology by period / region [HDD], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], History: earliest times to present day [HBL], Architecture [AM], History of art / art & design styles [AC]