Timeless Cities

For Italian city builders over the course of a thousand years, the urban realm was the great theater where their best aspirations were played out, the place where society said the most substantial things about who they were and what they longed for. In Timeless Cities , architect David Mayernik reveals how Venice, Rome, Florence, Siena, and Pienza emerged from the cultural ideas of humanism that characterized Italian society from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. Cities were literally designed to be models of the mind and images of heaven. Mayernik takes the reader on an architect's tour of these five cities and describes the cultural beliefs and ideas behind the buildings. Not only a journey into the past, Timeless Cities also explains why these city-building ideas are relevant today. Whether travelling on holiday or appreciating the art and architecture of Italy from home, Mayernik helps bring the wonder and beauty of the Italian mind and its great cities a little closer.

Named as one of the top forty architects of his generation in the United States, David Mayernik is an internationally recognized practicing architect, painter, and educator. In addition to having been Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture, he has taught with the New York Academy of Art, the Institute for the Study of Classical Architecture, and the University of Virginia's Erasmus-Jefferson Scholars program in Tuscany. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.