Rome: An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present

by Rabun Taylor, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, Spiro Kostof

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107601499
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/08/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	450
Sales rank:	826,019
Product dimensions:	6.97(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Rabun Taylor is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published articles in the American Journal of Archaeology, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Roman Archaeology, and Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. His books include Public Needs and Private Pleasures: Water Distribution, the Tiber River, and the Urban Development of Ancient Rome (2000) and Roman Builders: A Study in Architectural Process (2003).

Katherine Rinne is an independent scholar and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and Adjunct Professor of Architecture at California College of the Arts. Her book The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (2011) won the 2011 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Prize for Landscape History from the Foundation for Landscape Studies and the 2012 Spiro Kostof Award for Urban History from the Society of Architectural Historians. She is Project Director for Aquae Urbis Romae: The Waters of the City of Rome.

Spiro Kostof (1936–91) was a professor of the History of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the foremost architectural and urban historians of the twentieth century. His books include A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (1987), The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (1991), and The City Assembled: Elements of Urban Form through History (1992). His previously unpublished Mathews Lectures at Columbia University, New York, delivered in 1976, form the foundation of the middle section of this book.

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

'… 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

From the Publisher