Rome We Have Lost (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780198803966)

For a thousand years, Rome was enshrined in myth and legend as the Eternal City. No Grand Tour would be complete without a visit to its ruins. But from 1870 all that changed. A millennium ended as its solitary moonlit ruins became floodlit monuments on traffic islands, and its perimeter shifted from the ancient nineteen-kilometre wall with twelve gates to a fifty-kilometre ring road with thirty-three roundabouts and spaghetti junctions.

The Rome We Have Lost is the first full investigation of this change. John Pemble musters popes, emperors, writers, exiles, and tourists, to weave a rich fabric of Roman experience. He tells the story of how, why, and with what consequences that Rome, centre of Europe and the world, became a national capital: no longer central and unique, but marginal and very similar in its problems and its solutions to other modern cities with a heavy burden of 'heritage'.

This far-reaching book illuminates the historical significance of Rome's transformation and the crisis that Europe is now confronting as it struggles to re-invent without its ancestral centre -- the city that had made Europe what it was, and defined what it meant to be European.


Author: John Pemble
ISBN-10: 0198803966
ISBN-13: 9780198803966
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
Language: English
Published: 01/02/2018
Pages: 202
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.30w x 0.90d