ABSTRACT
Rome is not just a city. It is an idea, a myth at the heart of western culture. It has been the seat of an empire and the capital of one of the world’s most far-reaching religions, but its significance is far more than the sum of its historical parts. The resonances of Rome, both within and beyond the walls of the city itself, have long fascinated scholars from a range of disciplines, and this book, with its particular emphasis on the relationship between past and present, seeks to complement a growing literature in English. Among recent studies, Peter Bondanella’s 1987 book The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World is notable for charting the construction and enduring relevance of the myth of Rome,1 while Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture 1789-1945 (1999) has looked at the influence of that myth from the late eighteenth century to the modern era.2 The role of ancient literature in shaping the idea of Rome has also been explored, for instance, in Catherine Edwards’s Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (1996), and new perspectives on reading and viewing Rome through literary and other sources from antiquity to the present are contained in The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory (2007).3 A lucid account of the evolution of the city itself, most particularly since Italian unification, can be found in John Agnew’s 1995 book entitled simply Rome,4 which returns frequently to the problems that modern planners have encountered in accommodating existing historical layers.5 While most of these books are located in a particular discipline or have a more focused time-frame, the present volume encompasses an eclectic choice of topics and has an ambitious chronological scope, ranging from a re-evaluation of the afterlife of classical buildings in the early Middle Ages to the cinematic representation of Rome’s largest piazza. Some of the chapters deal with very specific projects, such as the counter-Reformation restoration of the altar area of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, while others take a broader view, looking, for instance, at the theoretical discussions that helped shape a more rationalized Rome in the eighteenth century. And yet, while inclusive,
this volume is by no means comprehensive and makes no pretence of being an exhaustive account of the relationship of Rome to its past. There are necessarily gaps in coverage, with no chapters, for instance, on the later Middle Ages, Baroque urbanism or the Napoleonic occupation of the city. Nonetheless, the diversity of both subject matter and approach aims to convey something of the complexity of the relationship between Rome and its past lives. Using a variety of approaches and methods, the authors tackle the central questions of the occupation and reoccupation of space, the use and reuse of materials, the borrowing of forms and the appropriation of meaning. The book explores notions of reinterpretation and excavation in the broadest sense: from literal plunder to the recasting of styles, from conscious attempts at the re-enacting of empire to how the past is accommodated and conserved in the modern city, and the extent to which the conservation of heritage is at odds with vivibilità.
