Rome

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.
This is the first urban history of Rome to span its entire three-thousand-year history.
Rabun Taylor is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published articles in the American Journal of Archaeology, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Roman Archaeology, and Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. His books include Public Needs and Private Pleasures: Water Distribution, the Tiber River, and the Urban Development of Ancient Rome (2000) and Roman Builders: A Study in Architectural Process (2003).
Spiro Kostof (1936-91) was a professor of the History of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the foremost architectural and urban historians of the twentieth century. His books include A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (1987), The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (1991), and The City Assembled: Elements of Urban Form through History (1992). His previously unpublished Mathews Lectures at Columbia University, New York, delivered in 1976, form the foundation of the middle section of this book.
'... this volume will be useful for scholars from many sub-fields looking to situate their work in the city's own history. ... But the value of the large-scale urban biography model is precisely to make us think about patterns in the city's life over time. This book achieves its aims admirably, and will be valuable for students and researchers alike.' Amy Russell, Bryn Mawr Classical Review