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.
Author(s): Rabun Taylor, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, Spiro Kostof
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: XVIII+432
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. A bend in the river 4
2. A storybook beginning 10
3. Ideological crossfire 19
4. Big men on the campus 32
5. 'Res publica restituta' 43
6. Memorials in motion: spectacle in the city 52
7. The concrete style 60
8. Remaking Rome's public core I 72
9. Remaking Rome's public core II 82
10. Continuity and crisis 93
11. 'Rus in urbe': a garden city 103
12. Administration, infrastructure, and disposal of the dead 114
13. Mapping, zoning, and sequestration 122
14. Tetrarchic and Constantinian Rome 132
15. Trophies and 'tituli': Christian infrastructure before Constantine 142
16. Walls make Christians: from fourth to fifth century 151
17. A tale of two Romes 160
18. The Rome of Goths and Byzantines 170
19. Christian foundations 180
20. From 'Domus laterani' to 'Romanum palatium' 188
21. The Leonine City: St Peter's and the Borgo 196
22. Via Papalis, the Christian 'decumanus' 205
23. The urban theaters of 'imperium' and SPQR 214
24. Housing daily life 222
25. Chaos in the fortified city 232
26. The Tiber River 241
27. Humanist Rome, absolutist Rome (1420-1527) 251
28. Planning Counter-Reformation Rome 261
29. Processions and populations 271
30. Magnificent palaces and rhetorical churches 281
31. Neoclassical Rome 292
32. Picturing Rome 303
33. Revolution and Risorgimento 313
34. Italian nationalism and 'romanita' 324
35. A city turned inside out 336
Glossary of Persons, Places, and Terms 349
Works Cited 363
Index 391
