Frances Mayes recommended this book and I'm really enjoying it. I think you do have to be knowledgeable about these majestic Italian cities to be able to appreciate the way the author brings depth to your navigation. I'm going to use this book to form several itineraries through Rome.

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Product Description

An illuminating tour through five Italian cities famous for brilliant architecture that captures the ideas of a culture and a time in history.

For Italian city builders more than a thousand years ago, 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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1289818 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-03
• Released on: 2003-09-02
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
"A thoughtful, passionate, learned, and unexpected examination of cities past, present, and ideal, written with conviction and humor." -- Ingrid Rowland

"Erudite travelers will enjoy [Mayernik's] thoughtful meditations." -- Chicago Tribune

"You'll never look at a building again without wondering what its meaning is." -- Washington Post

About the Author
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.

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Customer Reviews

Wonderful Journey Across Time and Ideas
Timeless Cities is indeed a wonderful journey, a voyage across time and ideas. The author tells a poetic, scholarly and delightful story of five Italian cities and how they became meaningful and memorable places, remaining so to this day.

For those who have experienced the magical, transforming impact Rome, Florence, Venice, Siena and Pienza have on their visitors, David Mayernik unlocks the richly poetic ideas which are their very essence. An architect and traveler, his writing is filled with the passion of one who truly loves and understands the tradition of those great cities: the tradition of humanism.

For all for whom life is, above all, a cherished series of discoveries and experiences, Mayernik extends a masterful invitation to explore those places which stir our souls and which demonstrate the highest fulfillment of our collective potential for cultural and artistic achievement. He then challenges us to again seek to create cities "through which dance the Muses", cities which are "built Ideas suffused with cultural Memory". Accept his gracious invitation. It is a journey you will treasure.

A memorable lesson
Mr. Mayernik transports the reader to the glorious past of Rome, Venice, Florence, Siena, and Pienza; a past in which city builders sought to make their cities into reflections of the perfect heavenly City of God; a past in which every stone, every building, every piazza was an episode of the larger urban narrative that played itself for its citizens as a great "theatre of the mind."

Mr. Mayernik's writing allows us to view the urban mythologies of these places not as History, events frozen in by gone times and no longer capable of speaking to present generations, but as living lessons in city building; he invites his audience to learn the 'language' of these five cities so that we too can build memorable places.