Product Description

Rome is not one city but many, each with its own history unfolding from a different center: now the trading port on the Tiber; now the Forum of antiquity; the Palatine of imperial power; the Lateran Church of Christian ascendancy; the Vatican; the Quirinal palace. Beginning with the very shaping of the ground on which Rome first rose, this book conjures all these cities, past and present, conducting the reader through time and space to the complex and shifting realities--architectural, historical, political, and social--that constitute Rome.

A multifaceted historical portrait, this richly illustrated work is as gritty as it is gorgeous, immersing readers in the practical world of each period. James McGregor's explorations afford the pleasures of a novel thick with characters and plot twists: amid the life struggles, hopes, and failures of countless generations, we see how things truly worked, then and now; we learn about the materials of which Rome was built; of the Tiber and its bridges; of roads, aqueducts, and sewers; and, always, of power, especially the power to shape the city and imprint it with a particular personality--like that of Nero or Trajan or Pope Sixtus V--or a particular institution.

McGregor traces the successive urban forms that rulers have imposed, from emperors and popes to national governments including Mussolini's. And, in archaeologists' and museums' presentation of Rome's past, he shows that the documenting of history itself is fraught with power and politics. In McGregor's own beautifully written account, the power and politics emerge clearly, manifest in the distinctive styles and structures, practical concerns and aesthetic interests that constitute the myriad Romes of our day and days past.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #614761 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780674022638
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
This intricate, literary traveler's guide explores the contiguous cities of Rome built on the Tiber floodplain over the centuries. McGregor, co-head of the University of Georgia's department of comparative literature, chronologically traces the successive periods of intense architecture and planning that helped Rome achieve strategic greatness, from the Etruscan management of the Tiber Island ford 3,000 years ago, to the city's unparalleled artistic stamp by Bramante and Michelangelo during the Renaissance, to Mussolini's monumental Fascist vision, to the precarious repairs heralding the Jubilee Year of 2000. The ancient historian Strabo remarked that while Greek cities were esteemed for their beauty and wealth, Rome excelled in the construction of roads, aqueducts and sewers, and on this theme McGregor dwells expertly, giving readers an excellent tour of ancient landmarks. As an official residence of emperors until the fourth-century displacement of the capital to Constantinople, Rome gushed with water in the form of baths and fountains; with the return of the popes from Avignon in 1377, the Vatican assumed prominence, and Bramante's restructuring of Old St. Peter's became a beacon for Rome's new mission. Here is a walking tour in stately, inviting prose that renders wonderfully manageable a massive history lesson for the intellectually curious and adept. Illus. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Where history, architecture, and travel find common ground is where this author dwells. Here he revisits the long and distinguished history of Rome. McGregor's educational and practical account, which underscores the unplanned nature of the Eternal City's evolution from a place to ford the Tiber River, focuses primarily on Rome as, first, home of the Roman emperor and, second, seat of the papacy (with final pages given over to Rome as capital of a united modern kingdom and the post-World War II republic). The narrative structure is what will attract tourists with a sense of the past: McGregor "presents history concretely through descriptions of monuments that still exist today," and he describes those monuments "in the order that readers would encounter them as they walked through the city." Peppered with crisp illustrations, this book is recommended for the erudite traveler. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Rome from the Ground Up is an enthralling book. McGregor's sensitive, lively writing rises to the beauties of the city. -- Ingrid Rowland, author of From Heaven to Arcadia

Customer Reviews

The Key to Rome
This is a great book. It must be daunting to attempt to write a new book about Rome, about which everything has already been said, and said better. But this is a truly imaginative and original book. I've been to Rome several times and love the city and I own several guide books. But this is my favorite book on Rome. It is useful as a guide book but is really a long scholarly essay on the city bringing up-to-date scholarship into focus and creating a vivid sense of the city as it was at various moments in its history. The problem with Rome is that almost everywhere you look around you are surrounded with the remnants of classical times, Mediaeval, Renaissance and Baroque Romes all mixed together. But "Rome from the Ground up" brings to life a series of cities which existed in succession as the result of changing natural and cultural and historical forces. Usually the more detailed a guide book is the more it fails to capture the likeness of the city it is portraying, but this one manages to be very detailed, and to succeed especially well at sketching the perspectives into which everything fits.
The illustrations are small, but they are extremely well photographed and selected to go with the text. The alternation between the high quality contemporary photographs and the engravings of architectural facades and plans, and paintings is beautiful. And the two historical maps which are the endpapers of the book are very helpful in imagining what the city looked like "then" which is what one is always doing when walking in Rome.
This is the one book on Rome you will want to own as the key to all the other books on Rome you may have.

Entertaining and enlightening
Rome from the Ground Up will entertain and enlighten both frequent visitors to Rome and those who have yet to see the city, both the determined walker of itineraries and the armchair traveler. Those intending to use the book as a guide should turn first to the last chapter, "Information," where McGregor describes the itinerary traced in each of the book's historical chapters and provides both the briefest and most practical guide I have seen to useful information for visitors to Rome. (Harvard University Press has made this entire chapter, as well as current links to the websites recommended there by McGregor, available on its website, www.hup.harvard.edu.) The illustrations are colorful and have been chosen to complement the text; the historical maps on the endpapers show both the entire plan of the classical city and the most important regions of the post-classical city (the Vatican, Trastevere, and the Campo Marzio). It is the combination of elegant prose with sharp observation, however, which makes McGregor an ideal cicerone from geologic time and the Tiber's carving out of Rome's canyons through the most recent Jubilee and the very mixed signs for Rome's future.

Comprehensive and Illuminating
I thought I knew Rome well after living there for several months studying its' architecture, art, and urban structure, but I was constantly delighted by this book's comprehensive scope and illuminative details. McGregor's method of looking at each era of the city through a region's buildings, urban fabric, and artistic treasures is a great way of organizing what can otherwise be an impossible avalanche of information. This method may not be for everyone - if want to pick up a book to find out who built a particular part of the Lateran under what pope, buy the Blue Guide. If you want to know why something was built and how that "why" has affected the physical structure of the city over millennia, this is the book for you. The photographs are magnificent and correlate well with the text, and as for the lack of maps, IMHO you're better off buying a pocket map for a couple of Euro that shows the entire area at a decent scale in order to get a handle on the whole thing, rather than a wee page-sized map that doesn't do the subject justice let alone help you find your way around.