When in Rome: 2000 Years of Roman Sightseeing - Hardcover

Sturgis, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0711227829 ISBN 13: 9780711227828

Publisher: Frances Lincoln, 2011

Synopsis

'In the middle of the second century BC Rome was under threat. The danger, however, was not military. It was the one-legged sideboard that, apparently, posed the gravest danger to Rome's power - at least according to the historian Livy. There were other worrying signs: bed curtain, bronze couches and a fad for female lute players at private banquets. To the stern fathers of the Roman Republic these corrupting manifestations of 'Eastern luxury' were deeply troubling.'

So begins Matthew Sturgis's book - a guide to Rome with a difference.

For over two thousand years Rome has been acknowledged as one of the world's great cities. It has been the hub of a magnificent empire, the birthplace of an enduring Church, the spring from which the Renaissance would draw its knowledge of the Classical past, the goal of every educated European making the Grand Tour and a pre-eminent centre of mass tourism.

Here is Rome through the eyes of the travellers who have flocked there over the centuries: from the sophisticated Turkish ambassador who found Republican Rome a bit crude and primitive, really, to the eastern Emperor overawed by the glories of Imperial Rome, to the pilgrims who in the Dark and Middle Ages visited the 'pitiful, malodorous but sanctified rump' that Rome had become; then to the eager classicists and collectors who flocked to Renaissance Rome, followed by the Grand Tourists, the Romantics, and the rather less grand tourists of today.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Sturgis is the author of numerous books, including the highly praised Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography and Walter Sickert: A Life, and also a regular reviewer in and contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, the Sunday Telegraph and other papers.

Review

A dashing chronicle of what the world and his wife made of the Forum, the Pantheon and the Colosseum.

Book of the Week: Sturgis's book explains just what Rome's visitors have been looking at through the ages - the buildings, the statues, the paintings, the artefacts that have most impressed each generation of travellers from the time of the Roman Republic in the 2nd Century BC to the present age for mass tourism.

A dashing chronicle of what the world and his wife made of the Forum, the Pantheon and the Colosseum.

About this edition

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0711227829
• ISBN 13: 9780711227828
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296