Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History

by Robert Hughes

From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome—as city, as empire, and, crucially, as an origin of Western art and civilization, two subjects about which Hughes has spent his life writing and thinking.

Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountered as a hungry twenty-one-year-old fresh from Australia in 1959. From that exhilarating portrait, he takes us back more than two thousand years to the city's foundation, one mired in mythologies and superstitions that would inform Rome's development for centuries.

From the beginning, Rome was a hotbed of power, overweening ambition, desire, political genius, and corruption. Hughes details the turbulent years that saw the formation of empire and the establishment of the sociopolitical system, along the way providing colorful portraits of all the major figures, both political (Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, Caligula) and cultural (Cicero, Martial, Virgil), to name just a few. For almost a thousand years, Rome would remain the most politically important, richest, and largest city in the Western world.

From the formation of empire, Hughes moves on to the rise of early Christianity, his own antipathy toward religion providing rich and lively context for the brutality of the early Church, and eventually the Crusades. The brutality had the desired effect—the Church consolidated and outlasted the power of empire, and Rome would be the capital of the Papal States until its annexation into the newly united kingdom of Italy in 1870.

As one would expect, Hughes lavishes plenty of critical attention on the Renaissance, providing a full survey of the architecture, painting, and sculpture that blossomed in Rome over the course of the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, and shedding new light on old masters in the process. Having established itself as the artistic and spiritual center of the world, Rome in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries saw artists (and, eventually, wealthy tourists) from all over Europe converging on the bustling city, even while it was caught up in the nationalistic turmoils of the Italian independence struggle and war against France.

Hughes keeps the momentum going right into the twentieth century, when Rome witnessed the rise and fall of Italian Fascism and Mussolini, and took on yet another identity in the postwar years as the fashionable city of "La Dolce Vita." This is the Rome Hughes himself first encountered, and it's one he contends, perhaps controversially, has been lost in the half century since, as the cult of mass tourism has slowly ruined the dazzling city he loved so much. Equal parts idolizing, blasphemous, outraged, and awestruck, Rome is a portrait of the Eternal City as only Robert Hughes could paint it.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Art, Italy, Travel, Ancient History, Roman History

512 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2011

About the author

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO was an Australian art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970. He was educated at St Ignatius' College, Riverview before going on to study arts and then architecture at the University of Sydney. At university, Hughes associated with the Sydney "Push" – a group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. Among the group were Germaine Greer and Clive James. Hughes, an aspiring artist and poet, abandoned his university endeavours to become first a cartoonist and then an art critic for the Sydney periodical The Observer, edited by Donald Horne. Around this time he wrote a history of Australian painting, titled The Art of Australia, which is still considered to be an important work. It was published in 1966. Hughes was also briefly involved in the original Sydney version of Oz magazine, and wrote art criticism for The Nation and The Sunday Mirror.

Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London, England (1965) where he wrote for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Observer, among others, and contributed to the London version of Oz. In 1970 he obtained the position of art critic for TIME magazine and he moved to New York. He quickly established himself in the United States as an influential art critic.In 1975, he and Don Brady provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island.

In 1980, the BBC broadcast The Shock of the New, Hughes's television series on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. In 1987, The Fatal Shore, Hughes's study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, became an international best-seller.

Hughes provided commentary on the work of artist Robert Crumb in parts of the 1994 film Crumb, calling Crumb "the American Breughel". His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. He was again dismissive of much recent art; this time, sculptor Jeff Koons was subjected to criticism. Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000) was a series musing on modern Australia and Hughes's relationship with it. Hughes's 2002 documentary on the painter Francisco Goya, Goya: Crazy Like a Genius, was broadcast on the first night of the BBC's domestic digital service. Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oxford professor Mary Beard recommends skipping the first 200 pages of Rome because it’s inaccurate. I recommend reading Hughes’s whole book, then reading her corrections. That way you can spend more time in Rome with Hughes’s company.

In his first chapter, Hughes tells the story of Giordano Bruno, a heretic who was burned at the stake in 1600 for believing, among other things, the sun was just one of many stars in a vast universe. Bruno told the priests “Maiore forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam / perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.” After finishing the book, I laughed to realize Bruno doesn’t even make the Top 10 list of greatest characters in the book. When the cast includes Julius Caesar, Augustus, Constantine, the deliciously bad emperors — Caligula, of course, and Elagabalus the “transvestite who once arranged for his guests to be smothered in rose petals, dropped through trapdoors in the ceiling of his palace” — and artists such as Michelangelo and Bernini, it’s quite a couple millennia of stories. (The current millennium might consider some leading roles for women.)

Hughes begins with his personal history of coming to Rome in 1959 from Australia. “For a twenty-one-year-old student to go from memories of Australian architecture… to such near-incomprehensible grandeur was a shattering experience. It blew away, in an instant, whatever half-baked notions of historical ‘progress’ may have been rattling about, loosely attached to the inside of my skull.”

Hughes delights with lines like “The fountain is, in its very essence, an artificial thing, both liquid — formless — and shaped; but the jets of Bernini's Piazza Navona, glittering in the sun, mediate with an almost incredible beauty and generosity between Nature and Culture. Thanks to its fountains — but not only to them — the Roman cityscape constantly gives you more than you expect or feel entitled to as a visitor or, presumably, a citizen. What did I do to deserve this? And the answer seems ridiculously simple: I am human, and I came here."

Later he reminds us tastes change, and not just for how we view the Colosseum’s blood sports. Charles Dickens thought Bernini’s monuments were “intolerable abortions.” Percy Bysshe Shelley loved the remains of ancient Rome but judged modern Italians “degraded, disgusting & odious.”

Hughes offers an interesting reading of the fascist era. “One cannot imagine a new Hitler arising in Germany, but a new Mussolini in Italy is neither a contradiction in terms nor even unimaginable.”

A few more passages:

A description of an memory palace for Gabriele D’Annunzio with a a torpedo cruiser: “From time to time, her bow guns used to be fired, in salute to the poet’s genius. They no longer are, because after nearly a century they (like his verses) have run out of ammunition.”

"Painting and sculpture are silent arts, and deserve silence (not phony reverence, just quiet) from those who look at them. Let it be inscribed on the portals of the world's museums: what you will see in here is not meant to be a social experience. Shut up and use your eyes. Groups with guides, etc. admitted Wednesdays only, 11 a.m. - 4 p.m. Otherwise, just shut the fuck up, please, pretty please, if you can, if you don't mind, if you won't burst. We have come a long way to look at these objects too. We have not done so to listen to your golden words. Capisce?"

“It wasn't built in a day and can't be understood in one, or a week, or a month or year — in however much time you may allot to it, a decade or a guided bus ride. It makes you feel small, and it is meant to. It also makes you feel big, because the nobler parts of it were raised by members of your own species. It shows you what you cannot imagine doing, which is one of the beginnings of wisdom. You have no choice but to go there in all humility, dodging the Vespas, admitting that only a few fragments of the city will disclose themselves to you at a time, and some never will. It is an irksome, frustrating, contradictory place, both spectacular and secretive. (What did you expect? Something easy and self-explanatory, like Disney World?) The Rome we have today is an enormous concretion of human glory and human error. It shows you that things were done once whose doings would be unimaginable today. Will there ever be another Piazza Navona? Don't hold your breath. There is and can be only one Piazza Navona, and, fortunately, it is right in front of you, transected by the streams of glittering water - a gift to you and to the rest of the world from people who are dead and yet can never die. One such place, together with all the rest that are here, is surely enough."

[Grace Tjan · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, I must say that the title is a bit puzzling. I thought that “Visual History” meant something like ‘pictorial history’, but there are too few pictures in the book to justify it. There is art and architecture galore, but other than that, there is a dearth of discussion about other aspects of culture. As for the personal, aside from a few brief anecdotes about the author's various visits to Rome, there is preciously little. Judging from the contents, perhaps the book should be titled ‘Art and Architecture in Rome, with Brief Historical Asides’ --- or something to that effect.

There is some history in the earlier chapters, which deal with the Roman Empire and its papal successor, but once Hughes gets to the Renaissance, it’s all art and artists. History only resurfaces after the great works of art have dwindled by the 19th century. Then, it’s almost exclusively political history. The dichotomy is at times disorienting --- I’d love to know more about the political and cultural context of the great artistic eras, or about how the city was governed, and how ordinary citizens lived. Instead, we get some tangential history that is interesting in itself, but is not that relevant to Rome, such as the history of the Albigensian Crusade (obviously, it has something to do with the papacy, but it took place entirely in Provence).

The art history/criticism that is the meat of this book is brisk, bristling with interesting details and occasionally memorably phrased: the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling is “almost all body, or bodies. The only sign of a nature that is not flesh is an occasional patch of bare earth and, in the Garden of Eden, a tree”; Caravaggio “thrashed about in the etiquette of early Seicento Rome like a shark in a net.” It is fascinating to learn about the history of all of those obelisks that dot the Roman landscape and the engineering feats that were accomplished to move and erect them. Or about the creative recycling/vandalism that went on through Rome’s history until relatively recent times (the Colosseum, for example, was used as a convenient quarry for the new Vatican, and the ancient bronze cladding of the Pantheon was stripped to make Bernini’s massive baldachino in St. Peter’s). Hughes goes beyond the familiar superstars like Michelangelo and Raphael, covering lesser-known artists like Guido Reni (“There can be few painters in history whose careers show such a spectacular rise to the heights of reputation, followed by such a plunge to the depths.”) and Annibale Caracci, who painted the staterooms of Palazzo Farnese. This was done during a particularly dissolute era in the history of the Church, when it was perfectly okay for a cardinal, later Pope Paul III, to have his private residence decorated with pagan soft porn scenes with a bestial twist like this one (it’s classical! --- it’s from Ovid’s Metamorphoses!):


The Rape of Ganymede by Jupiter's Eagle with Satyrs
Ouch!

Hughes points out that “to call such a theme inappropriate for a future pontiff would be a mistake: he had been made a cardinal by the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, whose mistress was Alessandro Farnese’s sister, Giulia Farnese. Moreover, he had four illegitimate children of his own, plus an unknown number of by blows.” As a Jesuit-educated ex-Catholic, Hughes pulls no punches against his former faith, in most cases with some justification --- scathingly denouncing the corrupt Renaissance papacy, the reactionary Church of the 19th century, the appeasement of Nazis and Fascists in the 20th, and the $ 500 “hefty ransom” that the Vatican demanded for a private tour of the Sistine Chapel today. But he’s at his crankiest (and funniest) best when charting the decline of 21st century Rome, where statesmanship has gone down from this


Augustus of Prima Porta

to this


“…a multi-multi-millionaire…who seems to have no cultural interest…apart from top-editing the harem of blondies for his quiz shows.”

and art has degenerated from this



to this


“Opening the can would, of course, destroy the value of the artwork. You cannot know that the shit is really inside, or that whatever may be inside is really shit…so far none has been opened; it seems unlikely that any will be, since the last can of Manzoni’s Merda d’artista to go on the market fetched the imposing sum of $80,000.”

No shit, indeed.

[Jim Mullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art critic Robert Hughes’ book Rome is a highly opinionated history and art tour of the Eternal City. Major tourist attractions are almost ignored as they have been much covered elsewhere and there are no recommendations for restaurants, no shopping tips for hipsters, no advice on where to stay. Bernini is much more presence than Michelangelo, Caravaggio more than Raphael, the Piazza Navona more than St. Peter’s. There are wonderful asides on how hard it is to move and raise a 500 ton obelisk without breaking it without the benefit of a modern crane, on the fact that ancient Rome probably looked and sounded more like modern Calcutta than the white marble city we see on tv and at the movies. While it wouldn’t take more than a week-long to visit all the spots he talks about at length, they are the places you would visit on your second or third visit to Rome, not your first.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don’t go into this expecting an even-handed, evenly-balanced history of Rome. Hughes is no historian. He is an art critic, and as such he makes a fine art critic. They say that to a hammer everything looks like a nail. To an art critic, the story is told in the art. This is a mostly easily readable, idiosyncratic history by an opinionated writer who focuses on the art, especially in the second half of the book—even to the point of occasionally wandering rather far afield from Rome itself. That said, I wish I’d known all the stuff in this book when I was teaching Art History.

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I was young, Robert Hughes - his art criticism, and especially his book The Shock of the New - was one of the most important things to happen to me. He grounded me in art, the culture, in a way that perhaps no other author did. Shock of the new indeed, he drug my half-educated post-graduate carcass at least partway out of the miasma of my spotty, second-rate college education and the torpor of my own unwillingness and inability have made it anything better. Back in c. 1989 he was important.

Which is why Hughes' book Rome, A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History was especially disappointing. What a mess! After a very promising introduction - the culture shock (and delight) of a young Australian's first visit to the Eternal City in 1959. But this introduction is misleading - the obvious care in its composition is not what the reader is in store for. Rather, you get page after page of a canned, poorly-organized, sketchy, and badly-written history of Rome.

The early history of Rome I blipped through - all those legends, she-wolf and cackling geese and Sabine women - maybe he got this stuff right, but who can tell, really? The telling here was not particularly riveting. But when I got to the historical, verifiable post-legendary period, things get verifiably bad. Skip Marius and go right to Sulla. Zip over Pompey and, pretty much, Julius Caesar. Spend lots of time on how crazy Caligula was - where Hughes employs a re-heated version (sometimes I think, from memory) of Suetonius (horse made consul, war against Neptune, etc.). Worse than this hodge-podge are the errors:

"Livia's elder son by him, Tiberius, was Augustus' main heir..." (p. 97). No, Tiberius was Livia's son by her first husband; Augustus had no sons, just several other male blood relatives (grandsons, etc.) he'd have much preferred - thus the legend of Livia the Poisoner. I knew this in 8th grade after watching BBC's I, Claudius.

"The least popular of Caligula's additions to Rome would have been the Tullianum, or Mamertine Prison, the oldest in the city..." (p. 99). Mamertine prison is very early, c. 7th century B.C. (Wikipedia, and elsewhere). Caligula ruled from 37-41 A.D. But even if Caligula did build this, later in the paragraph we are told "Jugurtha, once king of Numidia, died of starvation in 104 C.E. and the Gallic warrior Vercingetorix, Casesar's chief enemy in Gaul, was beheaded in 46 C.E." (p. 99). No! Here "C.E." is an error for "B.C.E." - further demonstrating why I detest the whole CE change - it is confusing, as compared to BC and AD (not that this is an excuse for a error coming out of Knopf). On page 124 we get this: "But the great imperial bath complexes, whose construction probably began late in the first century B.C.E and continued into the third century B.C.E..." Again, that should be third century CE - and I am not so sure about first century BCE either - the "imperial era" started in 27 BC - and I am not sure Augustus built any baths in the BC's. Furthermore, Vercingetorix was probably strangled, not beheaded.

"....known to history simply as Claudius, the last male member of the Julio-Claudian line... (p. 102). No! Nero was the last Julio-Claudian. Later in the paragraph, Hughes, after a sketchy I, Claudius re-hash of Claudius's wives, states that "...Agrippina, a descendant of Augustus and the mother of Nero..." - which would make Nero a Julio-Claudian at birth. Caligula, Claudius, then after these guys, on page 103, a brief "I, Claudius" rendition of Tiberius, who preceded the both of them - again, the organization of this book is very poor.

Hughes is at his best when he discusses art and architecture, occasional relief from the potted history 101 - his take on the Pantheon, which was brief, but exhilarating and clarifying. But still he screws up: "...and, grandest of all, as its name implies, the Circus Maximus. All (circuses) have since been buried beneath the structures of a later Rome." (p. 116) All, that is, except the Circus Maximus, which is a big wide, open, un-built-upon grassy-dirt area below the Palatine Hill. Anybody who's been to Rome knows this - it's hard to miss - and charmingly inexplicable - I really like how Rome doesn't bother to "develop" a lot of its historical sites - the random acts of signage in the Forum, signs about feeding feral cats in front of a temple complex, but not much about the temples -- and the big ugly, stripped-bare Circus Maximus, which isn't even competently landscaped.

Hughes is iffy when it comes to early Christianity as well: "Undoubtedly, the most crazed and sadistic attack on Christians by any Roman emperor was the one launched after the Great Fire in Rome in 64 C.E..." (p. 140). Maybe. But because Seutonius and Tacitus are our main sources for these persecutions - both hostile to Nero - it would be best to leave out that "undoubtedly." Furthermore, Nero's persecution, vicious as it may have been, was very short in duration, and pretty much confined to the city of Rome. Later persecutions, by Decius and Diocletian for instance, were far more extensive.

Other errors: Geta's name was not "removed" after 203 C.E., but rather after his brother Caracalla murdered him in 211 A.D. (C.E., I mean), page 334. On page 237 we are told authoritatively about "the Christian Antoninus Pius" which is a real howler - Antoninus Pius was so pagan he deified his wife Faustina I - the temple still stands (partially) in the Forum. After the Roman Empire, my general knowledge of Roman and general European history peters out, so I didn't find anything to rat out, but I was very suspicious while reading, figuring things were just as sloppy, both in research and editing. On page 439 the British are blamed for the bombing of Dresden - the British contributed 722 bombers at night, but the USA came by during the day with 525 (per Wikipedia). On the very last page, a famous account of a late Roman emperor's only visit to Rome (the capital was at Constantinople by then); a poignant and apt way to end the book, except Hughes says it was Constantine. It was not; it was his son Constantius II.


***

Well, after I wrote most of this review, I find Mary Beard in the Guardian (June 29, 2011) points out these same errors, and then some (she is an expert!). She says the book gets better after antiquity, so perhaps I will soldier onward...but let me quote Beard:

"We often talk about the decline of interest in the classical world. But, so far as I can see, interest in antiquity is as strong as ever (and, to give him his due, Hughes has seen that it is impossible to talk about modern Rome without acknowledging its dialogue with the ancient city). What has declined is any sense of obligation to write about the classical world with care and knowledge. Any old stuff will do and almost no one notices.

If a book about the history of the 20th century had as many mistakes as this one, I am tempted to think that it would have been pulped and corrected. It certainly would not have been widely praised and enthusiastically recommended as Rome has been."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201... 10/3/2018

I also found out Hughes died in 2012. This was his last book. Death being the ultimate excuse for not going over the proofs - and so I cast my aspersions on his heirs and agent and those knuckleheads at Knopf for not proofing the thing.

Despite the many, many flaws, I finished the books. When Hughes talks about art and culture, he can be exhilaratingly opinionated. Even when I didn't entirely agree with him, I felt invigorated. For instance he indulges in a rant in an Epilogue about what a nightmare Rome has become because of tourism. I somewhat agreed - I think The Sistine Chapel ceiling has been pretty much ruined for viewing by the awful scrum of tourists - I passed on it on my trip to Rome in '17 because it would've wiped out an entire day just queuing. There was a wait for the Colosseum and the Forum, but just an hour or two and well worth it. Same for the Vatican Museum, again worth it. Other sites and museums are no wait at all, including the Capitoline Museum, Ara Pacis, and the Baths of Diocletian (where the National Roman Museum is - the famed Hellenic bronze Boxer at Rest is there - I got so close to it I set off an alarm - Roman museum guards, when an alarm goes off, vaguely glance up from their phones, which is apparently all the job description requires). As long as you avoid the tourist high spots, there is plenty to see and I was dazzled, maybe as dazzled as Hughes was in '59.

***

But why? Why so sloppy, so big and sloppy? This book reminds me of Clive James awful Cultural Amnesia or Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom (I reviewed both on Goodreads). Such smart, cultured, experienced men, approaching their twilight years, feel compelled to compose a magnum opus, which, instead of spending time on it, they crank out far too fast, with far too many errors and far too much ramshackle historical background. Is it an Australian thing? An old guy thing? That need we all feel, as we walk down Larkin's Cemetery Road, to secure our legacy. Feeling threatened by the bang and blab of contemporary culture, all those short attention spans bowed over in the blue glow of smartphones, our cultural mavens (Hughes, James, Bloom) decide to take on a crumbling culture, rendering a lifetime of cultural engagement into a...hasty, sloppy vast statement that isn't even as good as a lot of sources you can find on the Internet. First rule of 21st Century published history: it has to be at least as reliable as Wikipedia. It's as if Rome was tapped out with his thumbs, as sketchy and incoherent and error-ruddled as the virtual world. What a wasted opportunity.

If books are going to compete with the Internet - which I believe they can do - they have to be better than the Internet - fact-checked, well-organized, coherent. More illustrations would help too - Rome has a couple of sections in color - good stuff, but about a tenth of what is required for a book by an art critic - and a book with "visual" in its title.

Finally, it should be mentioned that this book was published by Alfred A. Knopf. Do they even have editors, fact-checkers anymore? An unpaid intern surfing Wikipedia could have ironed out the errors I found. It's as if they aren't even trying. Maybe print deserves to die.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is nothing if not thorough. It follows the history of the city of Rome in sometimes excruciating detail, from the mythical twins suckling at the she-wolf down through relatively modern times. I'm glad I read it, but it was far too much of an investment to do again. The book ends up following a similar track as the city itself: ancient chapters--Punic wars, caesars, etc.--were riveting; the middle ages were such that even the most skilled author couldn't be expected to liven them up; the Renaissance brought things back to life; 1700-1900 dragged; WWII cranked it up again. To me, by far the best reading was in the early chapters as Hughes describes the feel of the city today. I've been there twice, and he gets it absolutely right.

[Radiantflux · Rating 4 out of 5]

65th book for 2018.

Big sprawling history of Rome (and to a lesser extent Italy) over 2500 years, from its foundation through the early 21st Century, mainly (as you would expect from Hughes) though it's art. I suspect there are problems with details here and there, but the overall picture is fascinating and provides a rich and layered appreciation of the city and its people.

4-stars.

[Daniel Etherington · Rating 2 out of 5]

Inevitably packed with information about this most incredible of cities, Hughes' Rome could, however, have done with a serious edit. Not only is it overlong and repetitive, it's also scattered with factual errors, never a good sign for a book that's ostensibly authoritative. (Eg p232 it refers to Clement V as a former "Italian cardinal" - he was French, and this is the whole thrust of the argument in the section about the papacy moving to Avignon; eg p543 it has the dates for Ammianus Marcellinus as "c300-95CE". Eh? It should read "c330-395CE".)

He also casually perpetuates dubious myths like referring to Monte Casino as a "venerable fortress and abbey" - it was actually a monastery and abbey. The Nazis weren't using it as a fortress, that was just the argument the Allies used for destroying it.

The Epilogue gives away the flaw in this book - Hughes moans about the current state of Rome, and Italy. Sure, the Berlusconi era wasn't pretty or a cultural high-point, but Rome is, and remains, and extraordinary place, despite how the experience of mass tourism in the Sistine may compare to Hughes' priviledged experiences in the 70s, or even in the 50s when he first visited the city. It just seems to indicate the he didn't have a sufficiently present or consistent relationship with the reality (as opposed to academic verison) of the city to provide a credible voice.

For a better book on recent Rome I'd recommend Whispering City: Rome and Its Histories or Rome: A History in Seven Sackings. For a more entertaining and psychologically more penetrating (though scattershot) read I'd recommend Al Dente: Madness, Beauty and the Food of Rome, despite its clichéd title. (I've not read Rome: The Biography of a City so can't comment on that.)

[Philip Girvan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Anyone who thinks of the young Picasso as a prodigy should reflect on the young Bernini, and be admonished. There was no twentieth-century artist, and certainly none of the twenty-first century, who does not look small beside him." -- p.283

Hughes's formidable intellect, the depth of his expertise, his refusal to mince words, particularly as concerns (post) modern art (he doesn't like it), and the sheer force of his writing make him an magnificent guide to Rome. I've never read a book that made a city come alive as this one does. The focus, always, is the art but the amusing and/or thoughtful observations, curious tidbits, and historical context provided by Hughes makes the book all the more valuable. Highly recommended.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't so much a history of Rome as more of an artist history of Rome, not that is a bad thing. Hughes is wonderful (or was wonderful). His writing his full of humor and love.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite things about visiting Rome is that it is a city that is very much itself-- it has no pretensions of being anything other than it is, because it does not need to be. With history, culture and art busting out all over, Rome is Rome, and while today it doesn't have the prestige of its past, no one can take its past from it. As one travels around Rome, they have myriad names thrown at them: Bernini, Caesar, Pope Somebody, Michelangelo, Pope Somebody Else, Rafael, Caravaggio, Pope Somebody X; it's all overwhelming and the visitor ultimately sighs in defeat and realizes that everything in Rome is Important and that's all that needs to be known. It was with much excitement upon my next trip to the Eternal City that I discovered Robert Hughes' tome on Rome. Robert Hughes wrote The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding which ranks as one of the best works of nonfiction that I have ever read. (For the reviewers who scoff that Hughes is ONLY an art critic and NOT a historian, I ask that they check themselves and read The Fatal Shore and be quiet.) That said, this is not one of the best works of nonfiction that I have ever read, but it is good. When cramming in about 2500 years of history from the early Etruscans and aqueducts to the Caesars to shift from Paganism to Christianity to the Papal States (in Rome and Avignon) to the Middle Ages, Renaissance, to Baroque and Classicism to Modernity and Mussolini into 463 pages, something is bound to be lost in the flux. There is a lot of information and it took me thirty minutes to read ten pages to give you an idea how dense it can be. However, Hughes applies his critical eye to the history, art, and culture and freely shares his sharp opinion and knowledge of everything. This might not be to everyone's taste, but I found his honesty refreshing (especially when he does not revere what is always considered reverential) and this book brims with bon mots. Hughes shines when writing about the Renaissance and Bernini and the 18th century by giving full character descriptions of the artists and politicians who helped make those times shine; his interest wanes in discussing Modernity and its art. He asserts, and I cannot help but agree with him, that nothing made in the modern era will ever achieve the greatness of past works, but we also live in a very different time.

What I appreciate about this book is that it fills in many gaps of history, such as how the Roman Empire transformed Europe and how much of what it is today is because of the Romans; or exactly how extensive the Roman roads were and how they were built; or how Napoleon's occupancy of Italy changed its future and lead to its unification; or how Fascism took root in Italy and how Modern artists helped its rise. There were many moments that made me pause and go "Oh, that's why...". If you're looking for a quick and easy history of Rome and its art, Rick Steves is your man; if you're looking for a detailed history of Rome's importance in the world, Hughes is for you.

[Jorge Zuluaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Desde que volví a empecé a leer con juicio hace unos 5 años, he descubierto de cuántas cosas me perdí por no haber leído más sobre los sitios que había visitado en el pasado como parte de mis periplos académicos por el mundo. En especial, lo mucho que pude haber leído y no conseguí hacerlo sobre museos, ciudades y monumentos en los diversos lugares del mundo que tuve la increíble suerte de visitar, especialmente en Europa y Estados Unidos.

Por esta razón, y con un viaje a Roma que se aproximaba, decidí buscar un buen libro que me sirviera para preparar esta nueva experiencia viajera y corregir mi falta de "preparación" pasada. Eso es justamente "Roma, una historia cultural": el libro ideal para leer antes, durante o justo después de visitar la Ciudad Eterna.

No es una guía turística. Tampoco un libro de Historia cualquiera. No enumera monumentos, rutas o lugares que deban visitarse; ni siquiera una lista pormenorizada de eventos o personajes que fueron importantes a lo largo de la historia de Roma. Aún así, la lectura de sus 12 capítulos ilustra lo suficiente sobre todos estos aspectos de la ciudad que sirven para hacer de la experiencia de visitarla algo diferente.

El estilo de Hughes es una extraña mezcla de divulgación histórica, crítica de arte y ácidas reflexiones sobre el mundo pasado y presente. Sin leer muchas de las reseñas que hay publicadas aquí de este libro, creo entender porque la calificación que obtiene no es precisamente muy alta, 3.84 cuando escribí la reseña, un puntaje que he visto solo en libros mediocres. Y es que el tono muy personal de Hughes para tratar la historia de una ciudad como Roma puede no gustarle a las personas que quizás se acercan buscando un texto riguroso de divulgación histórica.

A mi, personalmente, me ha encantado. He tenido la oportunidad de leer otros libros de Historia de Roma, en especial los de Mary Beard y otros autores reconocidos, y en todos ellos siempre me falto, por un lado, la perspectiva más personal del autor y, por el otro, una Historia de la ciudad posterior a la caída del Imperio.

Este libro, a diferencia de la mayoría de Historias de Roma que he podido leer, y que están en general obsesionados con la antigüedad, cubre casi 2700 años de historia. Desde la mítica fundación y el período monárquico, pasando por la república y naturalmente por el archiconocido período imperial, con sus autocratas de primera y con los desquiciados también, algunos que han atraído la atención popular por siglos y han reducido incorrectamente la imagen de los emperadores, tal y como insisten hoy muchos y muchas historiadoras, incluyendo a Hughes, en una simple sarta de megalómanos.

Pero no se reduce a esto, por supuesto.

La "Roma" de Hughes, penetra en la mucho menos divulgada historia del imperio tardío, con sus poliarquías, sus persecuciones a la secta de los cristianos y la lenta institucionalización del cristianismo. También narra la historia de la Roma medieval, con su transición de la institución del Prínceps pagano, a la del Papa cristiano. El período de la fundación y construcción de las iglesias pioneras, San Pietro, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanne in Laterano, de las reliquias, pedazos de cruz, paja del pesebre, escaleras pisadas por Jesús, etc.; reliquias que convirtieron a Roma por primera vez en el centro de peregrinación que no ha dejado de ser.

El grueso de la Historia de Roma narrada por Hughes en este libro, sin embargo, está en la dilatada y decisiva Roma del renacimiento y la modernidad (siglos XV a XIX); períodos durante los cuáles se concibió y construyo la Roma que visitamos hoy en día. Este fue para mi un descubrimiento que, como decía al principio, hubiera preferido conocer cuando fui por primera vez a la ciudad Eterna hace más de 20 años. Los capítulos dedicados a la obra decisiva de los papas Julio II, Sixto V, Clemente VIII, y por supuesto de todos los genios artísticos de los que se rodearon, Bramante, Alberti, Bernini, Michelangelo, Raffaello, Borrimini, que para bien o para mal construyeron la Roma barroca, la ciudad llena de arte extraordinario de la que disfrutamos los turistas del presente.

Fue muy emocionante visitar la ciudad y ver las vías, las iglesias, los monumentos que nos legaron los personajes de aquellos tiempos y hacerlo después de leer sus historias o la versión de las mismas narrada por Hughes.

Cuando crees que no se puede sacar mucho más de la historia de Roma, Hughes te reserva para los últimos capítulos las historias menos conocidas por la mayoría -yo personalmente era casi totalmente ignorante del tema- de la Italia del Risorgimento, del nacimiento de la república. En estos capítulos comprendí, por ejemplo, que uno de los monumentos más notables de la Roma contemporánea, el monstruoso pero imperdible monumento a Vittorio Emmanuel, contiene una de las más grandes injusticias de la historia de Roma: un edificio gigante de mármol blanco -un mármol ajeno a la Roma previa- dedicado a un personaje sin mayores luces. La mayoría de los visitantes imaginamos que fue este rey el unificador de Italia y olvidamos a los rebeldes, encabezados entre otros por Giuseppe Garibaldi, que deberían ser sin dudarlo aquellos por los que se debieron levantar los monumentos.

Por la profesión del autor, crítico del arte, la Historia de Roma de Hughes se centra especialmente en la historia del arte Romano, no solo del antiguo o del medieval y renacentista, sino también del moderno, llegando incluso hasta el cine del siglo xx. Lamentablemente, sin embargo, el libro carece de cualquier ilustración lo que limita significativamente la experiencia visual, especialmente en estos apartes dedicados a las artes. Personalmente leí buena parte del libro mientras estaba atrapado en aviones, sin una conexión a Internet que me permitiera buscar las obras y los personajes de los que habla el autor.

Como mencioné antes, una de las cosas que puede hacer que algunas partes del libro sean chocantes, es la abierta sinceridad con la que parece escrito. Yo también encontré apartes que me parece que se salieron de tono y que no me gustaron: un cierto machismo y misoginia e incluso una velada admiración por el proyecto fascista de Mussolini. Aún así, creo que las cosas que no me gustaron son muchas menos que las que disfruté.

En síntesis: no me cabe la menor duda, insisto, de que "Roma, una historia cultural" es el mejor libro para leer antes, durante o justo después de visitar a Roma.

Después de terminar el viaje que me motivo a conseguir y leer este libro, pero también después de leer este libro, me quedo con el fragmento del poema de Marcial, citado por Hughes en su capítulo sobre los Augustos: "Roma, diosa de tierras y pueblos, a la que nada puede igualar y a la que nada puede siquiera aproximarse".

[John Gossman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Hughes was a brilliant art critic and literary stylist. His "Shock of the New" is one of my all-time favorites and should be required reading for anyone interested in modern art--even if the only thing you find interesting is how much you hate.

Fortunately, I've read many of his books or I might have abandoned it early. Let me explain. The book is organized chronologically and the first three chapters are about ancient Rome: its origins, the Republic, and the Empire. Since there is less surviving art from this period, Hughes focuses on the straight history of the period. However, his history is terrible! It's a rehash of 19th century tropes, warmed up Suetonius, and outright factual errors. Finally it warms up when we reach medieval times and then explodes into full-blown Hughes-ian glory with the Renaissance.

As an art critic and historian, Hughes is unmatched. It's subjective stuff, and I don't always agree with him, but he does all the things right: chooses interesting art and artists, describes them and their significance, and tells great stories about the artist's lives and how there works were created and preserved. The amount of detail is almost overwhelming. Be sure to keep some browser tabs open to search for pictures (and maps).

I read this in Rome and the book took me all over the city finding obscure sculptures and museums to look up pieces Hughes describes. The "arma-croco-dillo" on the Fontana dei Quattro Fiume is in plain sight: but I think I was the only tourist in the crowded square that actually saw it. And I had the Galleria Spada, with its Borromini optical illusion colonnade to myself.

So what about the ancient Roman bits? I told my friend to just skip the first three chapters. If you want a refresher on ancient Roman history, there are endless options, Tom Holland's books, or Anthony Everitt, or Mary Beard come to mind. You won't even miss out on Hughes's prose as when he's not excitedly describing art, it lacks his usual brilliance. Just skip to the good parts.

If you wisely discard the beginning, and ignore some other factual errors, I'm strongly tempted to give this book 5 stars.

Ps - As I was writing this review, I stumbled across a review Mary Beard wrote for the Guardian in 2011. She highly recommended the book but said "Skip the first 200 pages!" I swear I hadn't read her review before I came to the same conclusion. It's rare I've found some chapters of a book so appallingly bad in the same book with others of such brillance. Maybe it says something about art!

[Ed Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

This appears to be Hughes' last book, and my guess is that he was pretty sick by the time the final stages of production were happening. It's poorly edited, with some bits repeating, several times in some instances.

That's the bad news. The good news is that this is a fine overview of the city, its art and architecture, and Hughes' involvement with it as a young man fresh from Australia. Is it as good as his Barcelona book? Not at all. Is it worth spending several evenings reading? Absolutely. As might be guessed, he's real good on Classical-era Rome (making the point, which I'd never seen clarified, that there is no "Roman" art from this period, just refinements of Greek models, occasionally in the hands of actual Greeks), the Renaissance, and especially the 20th Century, although his attempts to deal with post-WW II art in Rome isn't very interesting.

In short, a book for Hughes fans to pick up after they've read almost everything else by him.

[Sarah]

Because I am in.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

An Idea as Much as a City

In “The Aeneid,” his classic epic about the founding of Rome, Virgil wrote of that city’s destiny — of its leader young Romulus building “walls of Mars” and of its people, the Romans, for whom there would be “no limits, world or time,” only “the gift of empire without end.”

That empire, of course, would come stumbling to an end, but the city would endure as a repository of Classical art and architecture, as the seat of popes and as a myth-cloaked metropolis that remains an irresistible magnet for travelers and tourists. In his engrossing, passionately written new book, “Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History,” Robert Hughes, the former art critic for Time magazine and the author of critically acclaimed works like “The Fatal Shore,” gives us a guided tour through the city in its many incarnations, excavating the geologic layers of its cultural past and creating an indelible portrait of a city in love with spectacle and power, an extravagant city that, in Mr. Hughes’s words, still stands today as “an enormous concretion of human glory and human error.”
As readers of Mr. Hughes’s earlier books well know, he is highly opinionated, especially on all matters aesthetic, and never pulls his punches. “We cannot make the mistake with Romans of supposing that they were refined, like the Greeks they envied and imitated,” he writes near the end of this volume. “They tended to be brutes, arrivistes, nouveaux-riches. Naturally, that is why they continue to fascinate us — we imagine being like them, as we cannot imagine being like the ancient Greeks. And we know that what they liked best to do was astonish people — with spectacle, expense, violence, or a fusion of all three.”

The reader need not agree with Mr. Hughes’s acerbic assessments or even be interested in Rome as a destination on the map to relish this volume, so captivating is his narrative. Although his book is a biography of Rome, it is also an acutely written historical essay informed by his wide-ranging knowledge of art, architecture and classical literature, and a thought-provoking meditation on how gifted artists (like Bernini and Michelangelo) and powerful politicians and church leaders (like Augustus, Mussolini and Pope Sixtus V) can reshape the map and mood of a city. The one complaint a reader might lodge is that this book does not contain enough photographs to illustrate its richly evocative text.

These pages include some razor-sharp portraits — Seneca is described as “a hypocrite almost without equal in the ancient world,” Caravaggio as a saturnine genius who “thrashed about in the etiquette of early Seicento Rome like a shark in a net” — and some astute deconstructions of masterworks, like Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. The chapel’s ceiling “is almost all body, or bodies,” Mr. Hughes writes. “The only sign of a nature that is not flesh is an occasional patch of bare earth and, in the Garden of Eden, a tree.”
Strewn throughout this volume, too, are intriguing asides about Rome’s fascination with water and its plethora of fountains; its architects’ love of different colors of marble, gathered from the far reaches of its empire; and the engineering feats involved in, say, executing the wish of Pope Sixtus V to move a 361-ton Egyptian obelisk from the back of the new Basilica of St. Peter’s to the front. When the task had been completed, the pope reportedly crowed, “The thing that was pagan is now the emblem of Christianity.” That was the point, Mr. Hughes adds: to Sixtus, moving the obelisk, “achieved with such immense, concerted effort and determination, symbolized the work of the Counter-Reformation, the reunification of the Church, the defeat and pushing back of heresy.”

Writing in vigorous, pictorial prose, Mr. Hughes expertly conjures the triumphal, over-the-top, Hollywood-like pageantry that Roman leaders excelled at. Imperial victory celebrations would often start with a long procession of spoils and loot (which could take as many as three days to pass by), followed by an address by the conquering hero.

His face, Mr. Hughes writes, “would be painted with red lead, to signify his godlike vitality,” and he “would be arrayed in triumphal purple, with a laurel crown on his head and a laurel branch in his right hand.” The victory parade would wind around the city and conclude at the Capitol, where further rituals, including sacrifices, would be performed at the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.
“Julius Caesar’s sense of display and drama was so developed,” Mr. Hughes goes on, “that when he walked up the final steps to the Capitol, he had 40 elephants deployed to his right and his left, each carrying a torch in its trunk.”

Mr. Hughes is not only adept at making us see the grandeur and spectacle of Rome, but he also reminds us that our image of that city, at least in its Classical period, “comes down to us in a very edited form,” shaped by the art and artists of later years, who gave us a city that is “mostly white,” filled with white columns, white colonnades, flights of white stairs. In fact, he says, “the real Rome” of Augustus or even the second century A.D. was a “Calcutta-on-the-Mediterranean — crowded, chaotic, and filthy,” with most people living in tottering, jerry-built blocks of flats, “which rose as high as six stories and were given to sudden collapse or outbreaks of fire.”

In imperial Rome, Mr. Hughes reports, an estimated one person in three was a slave, and ordinary citizens were kept in line with free food and state-sponsored festivities, which included chariot races, melodramatic plays and bloody gladiatorial combat pitting man against man or man against beast. By the reign of Emperor Claudius, he says, Rome had an astounding 159 public holidays a year, about three a week. Propaganda, of course, was another essential element of imperial rule, and Roman emperors became adept at using art to memorialize themselves. Trajan’s Column, a cylinder about 100 feet tall and wrapped in a continuous stone frieze, Mr. Hughes writes, is, at once, “an astonishingly ambitious piece of propaganda” and “a huge ancestor of the comic strip.”
As for Emperor Augustus, he seems to have preferred sheer quantity: a 2001 study cited in this book said there were more than 200 surviving heads, busts and statues of Augustus, and estimated ancient production at some 25,000 to 50,000 portraits in stone. “All over the empire, sculptors were busy churning out standardized effigies of Augustus, mostly in marble but some in bronze,” Mr. Hughes writes, noting that this production seemed to be organized in “efficiently factorylike ways.” There “was more in common between classical Roman art and the techniques of Andy Warhol than one might at first suppose.” When it comes to Rome in more modern times, Mr. Hughes grows increasingly dyspeptic. With the exception of filmmakers like Fellini, De Sica and Rossellini, he complains, the past 50 years have “yielded little of interest, culturally, politically or especially artistically,” and he assails Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy as a vulgar, meretricious place, “gutted by the huge and ruthless takeover of its imagination by mass tourism and mass media.” And yet, under “the dreck and distractions of overloaded tourism and coarsened spectacle,” Mr. Hughes says, “the glories of the remoter past remain, somewhat diminished but obstinately indelible” — remnants of Rome’s splendiferous earlier lives.
(By Michiko Kakutani)

Rome by Robert Hughes
Mary Beard regrets that an elegant history of Rome is marred by howlers

Does modern art matter? In 1980, in The Shock of the New – a BBC television series-turned-book – Robert Hughes convinced millions of sceptics that it did. Shock was a powerful antidote to the Kenneth Clark style of TV art history. Hughes was a straight-talking Australian; there was no posh, languid reverence in his presentation. His message was that you didn't have to like 20th-century art (in fact he happily pointed the finger at some that was pretentious, overvalued and bad); but you did need to see how art contributed to the great debates of the period, from technology to the politics of social change.
It must have been a hard act to follow. Since 1980 Hughes has continued to work as a critic; he has written, among other things, a bestselling account of British transportation of convicts to Australia (The Fatal Shore) and a volume of memoirs; and he has weathered accusations of plagiarism, a near-fatal car-crash and years of litigation that followed. Now in his 70s, he has brought out Rome, a cultural history of the city he first visited in 1959; it is a narrative that stretches from Romulus and Remus to Berlusconi.

Reader, be warned. Skip the first 200 pages and start this book at chapter six, "The Renaissance". By the time Hughes reaches this point, he is well in command of his material and is on characteristically cracking form. He offers some delicious pen portraits of the artists and architects who designed and made what are now the tourist high-spots of the city: the Sistine chapel, the Piazza Navona, St Peter's basilica, the Campidoglio. Particularly vivid is his discussion of Bernini, "the marble megaphone of papal orthodoxy" – who was loathed by most visitors in the 19th century ("intolerable abortions" was Charles Dickens's description of Bernini's monuments), but increasingly admired in the 20th. And he nicely captures the spirit of the 18th-century grand tour. The desire of the young milords to discover the grandeur of ancient culture was only one side of the story. Sex tourism was the other. Rome was, as Hughes observes, the Thailand of the period, and he includes plenty of revealing stories about the brash bigwigs who turned up in the city: Lord Baltimore, with his harem of eight women, or Colonel William Gordon, who (if Batoni's famous portrait is anything to go by) pranced around the Mediterranean in a kilt and swaths of his family tartan. What on earth did the locals make of these people?

In his epilogue, Hughes, the modern cultural critic, elegantly savages the mass tourism and commercial culture of Berlusconi's Italy. A visit to the overcrowded Sistine chapel has become, he insists, close to unbearable, "a kind of living death for high culture" – which can only get worse "when post-communist prosperity has taken hold in China", and the Chinese flood in by the million. The same, he might have added, is also true of St Peter's basilica itself. It may be large enough inside to hold huge numbers of visitors in relative comfort, but they now have to go through a metal detector to get into the place. When I tried to visit one afternoon last December only two of these machines were working, and people in the queue winding around the piazza would have been waiting for more than an hour.

So what is the answer if you really do want to see the Sistine chapel in some peace and quiet? It is "to pay what is in effect a hefty ransom to the Vatican". For you can now book a two-hour visit to the museum plus chapel in a small group after closing time (with a guide "whose silence", as Hughes ruefully notes, "is not guaranteed"). This gives you a full 30 minutes to view the Michelangelo ceiling, in the company of no more than 20 other people. The only trouble is that it costs €300 a head, and the enterprise is run by outside contractors who are presumably splitting the profits with the church. This is, of course, typical of 21st-century Italy's approach to its heritage (the new director of the Ministry of Culture is apparently "a former chief of McDonald's" and the restoration of the Colosseum is to be sponsored by an upmarket footwear company). "If you don't like it," Hughes shrugs, "you can always write to the Pope; or else buy some postcards and study those in the calm and quiet of your hotel."
So far, so good. In fact, the second half of the book is an engaging history of this wondrous city, very much in the tradition of The Shock of the New, packed full of sharp observation and trenchant one-liners, artfully and fearlessly told. The first half of the book, especially the three chapters dealing with the early history of Rome, from Romulus to the end of pagan antiquity, is little short of a disgrace – to both author and publisher. It is riddled with errors and misunderstandings that will mislead the innocent and infuriate the specialist.

True, the occasional mistake in detail can sometimes be a price worth paying for the kind of long view that Hughes attempts to take here, covering almost 3,000 years of history. If a book is brave enough to think big, we can perhaps forgive a few errors with the proper names (of which there are several in Rome – "Miltiades" the famous fifth-century Athenian general, for example, being curiously substituted on one occasion for "Mithridates", the first-century king of Pontus). But Hughes has made more than a few pardonable slips. The "ancient" parts of this book are littered with howlers. Sometimes, for example, CE and BCE are confused (so that Julius Caesar's Gallic enemy Vercingetorix is said to have been beheaded in 46CE, almost a hundred years after Caesar himself was assassinated), or the correct chronology is flagrantly reversed ("a succession of autocrats, starting with Augustus himself and continuing onwards through Pompey and Julius Caesar", he writes, when in fact Pompey and Caesar preceded the emperor Augustus). On other occasions, the identity of the characters is hopelessly muddled. Hughes clearly has not been able to distinguish "Pompey the Great" from his (very different) father, also inconveniently called "Pompey".

Beyond such basic errors, there are also plenty of wider historical misunderstandings. Hughes somehow manages to attribute the foundation of the Colosseum to the wicked emperor Nero, when in fact the whole point about the Colosseum is that it was founded by Nero's successors as a propaganda coup against him. (Vespasian and Titus built it, with the spoils of the Jewish war, as a place of popular entertainment, open to all, on the very spot in the centre of Rome where Nero had established his exclusive and very private pleasure gardens.)

His characterisation of Roman pagan religion as full of "nature spirits" until the poet Ovid invented deities with personalities in the first century BC is a caricature even of the views of the antiquated text books he cites in his bibliography; and no decent scholar of Roman religion has suggested anything like that for half a century. In one of the most gratuitous howlers, he claims that the great altar of Pergamon (in modern Turkey), now on display in Berlin, was "torn asunder and looted by German archaeologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries and shipped, section by damaged section, to Berlin" – as if we should be imagining its desecration by a bunch of Teutonic Lord Elgins. In fact, the altar had been ruined for centuries when the German archaeologists arrived; they set about finding and gathering together its widely scattered fragments.

The list could go on.
We often talk about the decline of interest in the classical world. But, so far as I can see, interest in antiquity is as strong as ever (and, to give him his due, Hughes has seen that it is impossible to talk about modern Rome without acknowledging its dialogue with the ancient city). What has declined is any sense of obligation to write about the classical world with care and knowledge. Any old stuff will do and almost no one notices. If a book about the history of the 20th century had as many mistakes as this one, I am tempted to think that it would have been pulped and corrected. It certainly would not have been widely praised and enthusiastically recommended as Rome has been.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw this book in Feltrinelli Book Store in Rome. Checked it out as an ebook on our library system. I highlighted so many sections. How to summarize the book - I can't. It would be a book, where I would re-read sections. He is an entertaining writer - he has a sense of humor. As always, I learned more about Roman history - ancient, Renaissance, (High) Baroque and those Popes and more about the recent political history of Italy - becomes a nation in 1870. Great to be in Rome, so I can see the churches and artwork and also learn more about the history behind names - the street Cola di Rienzo - he is a real man - Cola di Rienzo, (c. 1313 – 8 October 1354) was an Italian medieval politician and popular leader, who styled himself as "tribune" of the Roman people in the mid-14th century. Unfortunately, di Rienzo, somewhat full of himself, was killed by a mob - he himself was trying to escape and tried to dress like a peasant, but did not throw away his gold jewelry. And, according to wikipedia - "Having advocated both the abolition of the Pope's temporal power and the Unification of Italy, Cola re-emerged in the 19th century, transformed into a romantic figure among politically liberal nationalists and adopted as a precursor of the 19th century Risorgimento, which struggled for and eventually achieved both aims. In this process he was reimagined as "the romantic stereotype of the inspired dreamer who foresees the national future" as Adrian Lyttleton expressed it..." There is a "small" statue (compared to the many large statues of many gods, angels, saints, popes, emperors, etc. in Rome) of him below the Campidoglio (The Capitoline Hill). I almost walked by it, but the hooded figure reminded me of my reading of di Rienzo, so I stopped and took a photo. Yes, the statue is Cola di Rienzo. So, just one small history lesson. There is so much more in the book. Hugh's thoughts on Rome, "It wasn't built in a day and can't be understood in one, or a week, or a month or year--in however much time you may allot to it, a decade or a guided bus rid. It makes you feel small and it is meant to. It also makes you feel big, because the nobler parts of it were raised by members of your own species....It is an irksome, frustrating, contradictory place, both spectacular and secretive. What did you expect? Something easy and self-explanatory, like Disney World?) The Rome we have today is an enormous concretion of human glory and human error." GLAD to be in Rome!

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I had finished this book BEFORE going to Rome, since there are so many tidbits about various neighborhoods and monuments that would give a more immersive experience. Robert Hughes is not at all a travel writer. He is an art critic, so 3000 years of Roman history is told largely through the lens of its art.
I was fascinated by the accounts of the lives of the regular ancient Romans, by Bernini's fame and eventual fall in his lifetime, and the (same with Guido Reni). I didn't know that the road from the Colosseum to the Emmanuele Vittorio Memorial was created as a parade ground by Mussolini (the primary walking route from our hotel to the center of the city), or that the street with the fancy vegetarian restaurant was THE 18th century location for artists' studios, or anything about what it could possibly be like to have to upright a broken obelisk and move it without the aid of heavy machinery.
This is a truly fascinating book that gave so much context to my recent trip to Rome, even if I read half of it after I got back. Highly recommended and very readable.

[Courtney Pappas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to read for school but god was this boring

[Gaylord Dold · Rating 1 out of 5]

Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Jerusalem: The Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, New York (650pp.$35)

Hughes, Robert. Rome: A Cultural, Visual, Personal History, Alfred A. Knopf, New York (498pp.$35)

On the 8th of the Jewish month of Ab in A.D. 70, the armies of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, commanded by his son and heir Titus and numbering some 60,000, were camped before the walls of Jerusalem. Inside the walls, perhaps half a million starving Jews survived the diabolical conditions and were still, mostly defiant. Before he was done, Titus and Roman legionnaires had killed, tortured, crucified, or taken to Rom half the city’s population, reduced the city itself to rubble, and invaded the Holy Temple, all to destroy the Jewish rebellion and disperse the strange cultists of Christianity.

This styory and many more, some equally astounding, are compellingly told by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose previous book, “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,” is perhaps the finest, strangest, most penetrating book ever written about Soviet Russia. For Montefiore, the history of Jerusalem is the history of the world, the chronicle of a penurious provincial town amid the Judean hills---and later, the strategic battlefield of clashing civilizations. Home to many sects, city of many names, Jerusalem is a place of such delicacy that it is described in Jewish sacred literature in the feminine.

In a word, Montefiore’s massive history of this both terrestrial and celestial city is magnificent. Detailed, illustrated beautifully, and told in sweeping prose organized chronologically from King David’s establishment of the city as a capital to the 1967 war, “Jerusalem” is a spectacular book for general readers. In between King David and the war is an amazing span of history, nearly 3,000 years worth, and Montefiore does justice to nearly every one. This is a book about the ages, for the ages.

Unfortunately, Australian art critic Robert Hughes’ new book about Rome has almost none of the authority, charm, wisdom or style of Montefiore’s book about Jerusalem. Billed as both a cultural and personal history, Hughes has included precious little of the former (though it is think with art history) and only a snipped of the latter, most being devoted to the author’s personal dislike of Rome’s shallow and frivolous videocracy under Berlusconi (now relegated to the sidelines). I’m happy to report that Hughes loves Italian movies of the 50s and 60s, and does a good job explaining cinema’s resurrection after World War II. But how can this be a cultural history when it disenfranchises food, style, most architecture, city and street life, poetry, music, son, kinship, sex and wine?

The book is divided into period: early Rome, Empire, Medieval, Renaissance and so on. Much of the early Roman period reads like a Cliff’s Notes, while many of the time periods are so heavily adumbrated with “art history” that the book dies a slow death page by page. Of greater interest and more lively written is the chapter covering the 18th century, neoclassicism and the Grand Tour, as well as the chapter on futurism and fascism.

One imagines Hughes burdened by the contract to write this book and employing several round-the-clock researchers to feed him batches of notes on file cards. Given Hughes’ distinguished background in art criticism and his profound and wide-ranging expertise, it is surprising that this knowledge somehow seems a burden that he offloads on his readers. There are many books about Rome. This is one book that simultaneously says too much and too little.

[Dave G · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a lot to like in this history of Rome, but there is also much to distrust and some, frankly, to be disgusted by. I'm not an ancient historian, and I'm certainly not an art historian. I have, however, been teaching Classics for quite a long while, and I've spent a lot of time in Rome.

So when a guide or critic makes mistakes, I quickly start wondering how much to trust what they say. Unfortunately, Hughes makes a number of careless mistakes when he's writing about Ancient Rome — enough of them that I distrust the accuracy of those portions of the book that cover eras I know less about. A small mistake is referring to "the art historians" Mary Beard and John Henderson. Both have chops as art historians, but they're classicists. A bigger mistake is his reference to Claudius as "the last male member of the Julio-Claudian line." He is that, unless you count his immediate successor Nero, which you should. To state that Virgil "became essentially the emperor's mouthpiece" ignores the major trends in Vergilian scholarship of last forty years or so. In a footnote on the musical contest between Marsyas and Apollo, Hughes says that it was "always taken as an allegory of the opposition, in art as in life, between sexy spontaneity (Marsyas) and disciplined invention (merciless Apollo)." I'd like to know by whom that interpretation was "always" applied. Telling the story of Constantine's vision of the Cross (and Hughes doesn't mention that the story appears long after it supposedly happened), Hughes quotes the Latin version of the phrase, "In this sign, conquer." The original was in Greek, not Latin. He talks about Polyphemus and Galatea as a story in Homer's *Odyssey*.

This is the kind of error that local guides make, and these are small complaints, but they add up to make an impression that Hughes isn't much interested in scholarship about the ancient world. It's as though his primary sources on Ancient Rome were books he read in college or early in his career. So I read the rest of the book, covering periods where I don't know the scholarship, with suspicion.

There's much to like, but I have to say that some sections are actually disturbing. He talks about how in some gladiatorial matches (another area where his scholarship is well behind the times) "women, untrained in a gladiatorial school, would be sent out to hack and bash awkwardly at one another on the sands." Perhaps he just attributes this awkwardness to a lack of training, but would women automatically be awkward? More than untrained men?

Perhaps that seems too picky, but I find his comments on Bernini's "Rape of Persephone" downright grotesque. "It," writes Hughes, "is an extremely sexy sculpture,and it should be, since its subject is a rape." To be blunt, WTF? I have never found this statue "sexy." Pluto, exultant in his mass and power, is terrifying, and Persephone is terrified. Perhaps there was a time when one could look at Bernini's sculpture and find it "sexy," but to me it has always been about unbridled masculine power and aggression and the damage it gleefully can produce. Nothing sexy about it.

I gained a lot from reading the book through, although there were points where I wanted to throw it away. Hughes is blunt and direct in what he admires and what he despises, and some of the writing is wonderful. But I have too many reservations to rank this highly.

[Ashley Cobb · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up on a whim. I was in Barnes and Noble's, it was on a discount rack for $6.95. As a Latin teacher, the allure of the deal was too good to pass up. I selected this book prior to my completion of "How To Read a Book" so I did none of the pre-reading exercises I learned in that book before making the decision to buy this one. The sub-title of "A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History" really drew me in. I was thinking it would be on overview of Rome (the empire). I scanned the table of contents and soon realized it wasn't a History of Rome (the Empire) but more of a history of Rome the city from ancient times to late 20th century. I was still intrigued so I plunged in. The book opens with a few details about the author. He is an Australian who received his education from a Catholic school (this becomes important later on). The first three chapters deal with the Roman Empire. There was a decent narrative but at times some of his facts seemed off. I wasn't sure if that was my faulty understanding of Roman history or errors on his part. (Other reviews on this book I have read suggest the latter). After the fourth chapter, the glaring issues begin to surface. While I thought this book was going to be a history of Rome, it is really the history of Art from Rome. I do not fault the book or the author for it not being what I originally supposed (that is on me and my failure to pre-read well) but the the fault lies within the delivery. Once the person of Christ enters the timeline of earthly history it became very obvious that the author is an ex-Catholic. He seems to delight and relish in pointing out the errors of the church and mistakes made by various popes throughout the ages. He stands as an anti-Luther if you will. Only instead of pointing errors and guiding towards reform, Hughes just sets out to impugn and disparage the church. The rest of the book feels almost schizophrenic as he hops from history to art to critic of the church seemingly haphazardly. His timeline is jerky as he often moves on then jumps back, almost like a person telling a story who forgot an important part and is backtracking. I learned some interesting things and I don't regret the book but readers should be aware of his bias. This book could have really benefited from better editing. Worth the read if you love art or history, hard to slog through if you don't.

[Annie B · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not one to rate a book only one star, especially one that as highly lauded as this book but I gotta say that I absolutely did not enjoy any part of this book. This is particularly surprising due to the fact that I am a history major with an intense interest in architecture and art history, but its true, I absolutely could not get into this book. From the very beginning I should have realized that I was not going to enjoy it due to the author's lack of structural and historical organization. Mr Hughes would jump from speaking about a painter, to the picture, to a second painter, and then would speak about the early life of the first painter. Also, did I mention an extremely insufficient number of pictures within this book? Ok, don't judge but this is an art history and architectural history book and Mr Hughes' descriptions of the buildings and paintings were so inadequate that I was having a hard time picturing buildings, paintings, and sculptures that I had just seen in Rome three years ago. I think a lot would have been added if the publisher had included some photos of the buildings or paintings that the Mr Hughes discussed at length in the chapters in which he was describing it. But perhaps the publisher could not do that because there was absolutely no organization in any of the chapters. The book was exhaustively researched but there was so much information that the point of the book got lost in the author's musing on different artistic theories and methods. This book had great potential but it fell really flat for me. I'm sorry Mr Hughes but this was just not for me.

[Rob Atkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

* 3 1/2 stars *
An entertaining and informative read for anyone who knows and loves Rome, or wants an account of the city weighted towards its aesthetic history -- particularly its art and architecture. Hughes is best when discussing the art of the Renaissance and thereafter, and there are especially rich sections on Baroque Rome and the 20th c. avant garde, particularly Futurism, and its links to Mussolini's brand of fascism. However the book is marred by a few avoidable errors in its recounting of Rome's political and social history, the kind of errors a good fact checker should have picked up, and any lay historian with a working knowledge of ancient Roman history/European history is likely to find these errors in chronology jarring and off-putting.
That said, Hughes is generally good company, a curmudgeonly art historian with decidedly conservative tastes who writes in an anecdotal and refreshingly frank style. He doesn't mind bucking canonical opinion, especially when it comes to the modernist canon, and one can't help laughing at some of his observations.
For a wonderful history of Rome I would first recommend Christopher Hibbert's "Rome: Biography of a City", to which this work would make excellent supplementary reading. In combination they will equip anyone interested in Rome with a rich understanding of its fascinating historical and aesthetic evolution from its founding to the present day.

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book more than i can possibly express in words.
This is not a straight history although there is plenty of that included, it is more focused on the arts and culture that this great city has produced. Robert Hughes is the sort of intellectual who looks at a civilization which had existed for thousands of years, takes in the various dynasties, wars and political upheavals and says "yes, but what art and culture has it produced?" because to him that's the really important thing. Thus, for him, the Borgia Papacy is only relevant for the great art and artists it patronised, Mussolini's fascist regime is only important for the futurist school of art and thought that it developed alongside.
There is an element of "cranky old man" towards the end but it's still worth reading.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

“It was being gradually borne in on me by Rome that one of the vital things that make a great city great is not mere raw size, but the amount of care, detail, observation, and love precipitated in its contents, including but not only its buildings. It is the sense of care—of voluminous attention to detail—that makes things matter, that detains the eye, arrests the foot, and discourages the passerby from passing too easily by. And it goes without saying, or ought to, that one cannot pay that kind of attention to detail until one understands quite a bit about substance, about different stones, different metals, the variety of woods and other substances—ceramics, glass, brick, plaster, and the rest—that go to make up the innards and outer skin of a building, how they age, how they wear: in sum, how they live, if they do live. An architect’s flawless ink-wash rendering of a fluted pilaster surmounted by a capital of the Composite order is, necessarily, an abstraction. […] It has not become architecture yet, and it will really not do so until it is built and the passage of light from dawn to dusk has settled in to cross it, until time, wind, rain, soot, pigeon shit, and the myriad marks of use that a building slowly acquires have left their traces. Above all, it will not become architecture until it is clearly made of the world’s substance—of how one kind of stone cuts this way but not that, of bricks whose burned surface relates to the earth below it. Now Rome—not the society of people in the city, but their collective exoskeleton, the city itself—is a sublime and inordinately complicated object-lesson in the substantiality of buildings and other made things, in their resistance to abstraction” (Hughes, p. 10).

“There was, however, one perfect unbroken obelisk still standing in Rome in the sixteenth century. The largest intact one outside Egypt, it dated from the nineteenth dynasty, about 1300 B.C.E., and had been brought to the Eternal City on the orders of none other than Caligula, having been raised at Heliopolis. Caligula decreed its transport to a site on Nero’s Circus, which, more than a thousand years later, turned out to be the back of the old Saint Peter’s Basilica. […] Pope Sixtus V had often looked at the obelisk from afar, and was not satisfied. It should not be behind the new Basilica of Saint Peter’s, which was then nearing completion. It must be moved to the front. A simple matter of civic punctuation—shifting the exclamation point in the sentence. […] This was the largest order of equipment the Italian maritime industry had ever known. But, then, nothing like this had ever been tried in the history of Italian civil engineering. […] The whole operation, which took days and consumed the labor of nine hundred men and some 140 horses, was watched by most of the population of Rome—who were kept back by a security fence and had been warned, in no uncertain terms, that anyone who made a noise or spoke a word would be instantly put to death. […] When the obelisk was vertical, Sixtus V could not contain his joy, crying in triumph, […] ‘The thing that was pagan is now the emblem of Christianity.’ And that was the point: to Sixtus, the moving or ‘translation’ of this and other obelisks, achieved with such immense, concerted effort and determination, symbolized the work of the Counter-Reformation, the reunification of the Church, the defeat and pushing back of heresy” (Hughes, p. 252).

“Spurred by Umberto’s filial piety—an emotion not always so easy to tell apart, especially in Italy, from costly and displaced narcissism—the Italians now proceeded to plan and build the largest and most stupefyingly pompous memorial ever dedicated to a national leader in Western Europe. […] Apart from the monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, practically nothing that was built in Rome in the latter half of the nineteenth century repays more than a cursory inspection. This monument is by far the largest act of architectural commemoration ever accorded to an Italian ruler, or indeed to an Italian of any kind, since the days of Julius Caesar. […] There are not many parts of Rome from which it cannot be seen, and few over which its white mass does not appear to loom—a singular disproportion, given the personal mediocrity of the man it so crushingly celebrates. It is 443 feet wide and 230 feet high, chopped and gouged with utter ruthlessness and a complete disregard for context into the flank of what had so long been regarded as one of Rome's most sacred ancient spots, heavy with history […]. Visually, it completely obliterates everything else on that hill. […] Dozens of medieval buildings, and even some ancient churches, were accordingly flattened to make room for this cyclopean monster. […] Not only is the national urinal the largest structure in Rome, its materials are absurdly conspicuous. Nothing can make it fit in. The general color of Roman buildings is ivory to buff to terra-cotta: the warm hues of tufa, brick, travertine, and other local materials. The stone of which the Vittoriano was made is not local at all. It is botticino, a corpse-white marble imported by rail and wagon at great expense, from geologically distant Brescia. Neither in design nor in material does the typewriter look Roman, and in point of fact it is not” (Hughes, pp. 372-374).

[Thomas Simard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is as wonderful as the city he describes.

[Melody Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book, spoiled by the extremely patronising and frankly ignorant epilogue. Totally unnecessary to finish such an interesting book with an old man's rant about " the good old days".

[Boris Limpopo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hughes, Robert (2011). Rome: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2012. ISBN 9780297857853. Pagine 624. 7,49 €

L’anno prima della maturità uno dei miei figli andò per 6 settimane a Melbourne per uno scambio culturale organizzato dalla scuola. A cavallo delle vacanze invernali, per ricambiare, ospitammo per 6 settimane il ragazzo, suo coetaneo, della famiglia dove era stato mio figlio. Fu subito ribattezzato «’a mumma», come il protagonista di uno dei film de paura di Corrado Guzzanti. La mummia era infatti di una passività impressionante e faceva venire in mente un famoso passaggio dell’Apocalisse (3,16): «Ma poiché sei tiepido, non sei cioè né freddo né caldo, sto per vomitarti dalla mia bocca.» Non che fosse del tutto privo di interessi: gli piaceva mangiare, preferibilmente la carne, ma dopo un po’ anche la pasta (aveva imparato a dire: «So’ un botto pieno») e gli piacevano le compagne di scuola, soprattutto una. Noi genitori ci preoccupavamo di fargli amare o almeno vedere l’Italia, e volevamo ricambiare l’ospitalità di cui aveva goduto nostro figlio. Lo portammo a Milano, a Venezia, a Mantova. E poi, un giro di alcuni giorni in macchina da Roma: Viterbo, la Cassia, la val d’Orcia (a Bagno Vignoni apprezzò la tagliata di manzo, a Pienza la cioccolata calda), Siena, San Gimignano, Firenze, Pisa. Mia moglie, laureata in lettere con una tesi d’archeologia, spiegava l’epoca romana, il medioevo, il rinascimento. Scendendo dalla torre di Pisa, la mummia uscì dal suo consueto indifferente silenzio e chiese: «But what do you mean, exactly, by the middle ages?».

Alcuni fili tenui, ma non insignificanti, legano la mummia con Robert Hughes, l’autore di questo libro: il primo è che entrambi sono australiani di nascita; il secondo, che entrambi hanno studiato dai gesuiti, anche se il primo a Melbourne e il secondo a Sydney; il terzo è che entrambi sono venuti a Roma da giovani, ma a sua giustificazione la mummia può addurre di aver avuto 5 anni di meno dei 21 che aveva Hughes quando restò folgorato dalla bellezza della città eterna. Tanto da risiedervi per alcuni anni, e intraprendere poi una fortunata carriera da critico d’arte che lo avrebbe portato prima sulle colonne della stampa inglese ((The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times e The Observer, tra gli altri) e dal ultimo su quelle della rivista americana Time, fino alla precoce morte, all’inizio di agosto di quest’anno.

[…] for the new and uninstructed arrival, such as I was in 1959, it is naturally the very big and rather obvious ones that strike first, and for me the most decisive and revelatory of these first encounters was not in Piazza S. Pietro, that mythic centre of faith, but on the other side of the Tiber, up on the Capitol above Piazza Venezia. Its messenger was not a religious work of art, but a pagan one: the ancient bronze statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (reg. 161–80 CE) riding his horse, in the most noble silence and stillness, on a pedestal which rose from the centre of a twelve-pointed star, in the trapezoidal piazza Michelangelo designed for the Campidoglio. I had seen photographs of it, of course; who hadn’t? But nothing really prepared me for the impact of that sculpture, both in its mass and in its detail. It is by far the greatest and, indeed, a rare surviving example of a type of sculpture that was widely known and made in the ancient pagan world: the hero, the authority figure, the demigod on horseback; human intelligence and power controlling the animal kingdom, striding victoriously forward. There used to be twenty or so such bronze equestrian statues in Rome, and yet more throughout Italy, such as the Regisole or ‘Sun-King’ in Pavia, which was so thoroughly destroyed in 1796 that not a skerrick remains and the only surviving trace of it is a mere woodcut on paper. All were toppled, broken up and melted down by pious, ignorant Catholics in the early Middle Ages, who believed that their vandalism was an act of faith, an exorcism of the authority of the pagan world. Only Marcus Aurelius survived, and by mistake. The good Catholics mistook the statue for a horseback portrait of the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great. But for that sublimely lucky error, Marcus Aurelius would have joined all the other bronze emperors in history’s indifferent melting-pot. [279-281]

Il lungo viaggio che Hughes compie e ci fa compiere con lui – oltre 600 pagine che si leggono d’un fiato, o quasi – inizia e si chiude su questo momento. Ed è un viaggio sempre tenuto a livello alto, e spesso altissimo, che parte dalle origini della città e si chiude ai giorni nostri, con un lamento per il declino che Roma, e l’Italia intera, stanno attraversando. E che, come spesso accade, è particolarmente evidente anche a noi, quando la osserviamo con gli occhi più disincantati di un osservatore straniero.

* * *

Io penso di essere un conoscitore passabilmente istruito di Roma, che è la mia città d’adozione ma non di nascita. E penso anche di aver letto un numero non piccolo sia delle fonti classiche sia degli studi successivi. Eppure ho trovato nel libro di Hughes molte cose che ignoravo. Qualche esempio? Questo spassoso aneddoto su Publio Claudio Pulcro, ammiraglio romano della prima guerra punica:

The aim of augury was not simply to foretell the future. It was to find out whether a proposed course of important action was likely to have the approval of the gods. A common way of doing this was by consulting the sacred chickens. These otherwise ordinary fowls (there seem to have been no criteria for telling a sacred chicken from a non-sacred one) were carried in a cage to the field by Roman armies. Before the battle, they would be given chicken-feed. If they pecked at it with gusto, letting bits of food fall from their beaks, it was greeted by the augurs as an excellent omen. If they ignored the offering, it was a very bad sign. If they ate half-heartedly or seemed choosy, that too had its meaning for the augurs. Many Romans of the highest rank took this charade perfectly seriously. One who did not was Publius Claudius Pulcher, an admiral of the Roman navy who, just before an engagement between the Roman and Carthaginian fleets off Drepanum during the First Punic War in 249 BCE, cast the grain before the fowl and was told, by the ship’s augur, that the birds would not eat. ‘Then let them drink,’ Pulcher exclaimed rashly, as he grabbed the chickens and threw them overboard. Alas, he lost the ensuing battle. [612]

Alcune etimologie:

Luna marble was the finest available if you wanted perfect whiteness, which Augustus and his builders did. Its whiteness rivalled that of the moon, from which it took its name. [1846]

If your vehicle, of which the most common type was known as a carpentum (whence, ‘car’), threw a wheel or broke an axle along the way, you could call for a mechanic or carpentarius (whence, ‘carpenter’) to repair it. [1970]

Le gloriose gesta del vituperato, ma simpaticissimo, Giuliano l’Apostata, per “educare” i cristiani:

‘Since by their most admirable law they are bidden to sell all they have and give it to the poor so that they may attain more easily to the kingdom of the skies . . . I have ordered that all their funds that belong to the church of Edessa . . . be confiscated; this in order that poverty may teach them to behave properly and that they may not be deprived of the heavenly kingdom for which they still hope.’ [3259]

Il fatto che la Scala Santa fosse stata portata a Roma da Elena, madre di Costantino:

Her other large souvenir of the Holy Land was brought back in pieces and reconstructed in Rome – the flight of twenty-eight marble steps from the residence of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem. Jesus Christ was believed to have walked up these steps on the way to trial and judgement by the Roman procurator, and the Scala Santa or Holy Staircase, as it is known, was reconstructed in Rome in its former papal residence, the Lateran Palace. [3620]

Il fatto che bugger, che ora in inglese sta per sodomita, fosse originariamente riferito agli eretici catari originari della Bulgaria; e che i Catari fossero fondamentalmente vegani:

Where did the Catharist faith come from? Because nearly all its ‘scriptures’ and holy books were destroyed, burned along with the Cathars themselves, it is difficult to be certain about this, but most scholars seem to agree that it was an eastern import whose roots lay in the Balkans and the Byzantine Empire. It was related to the beliefs of the Bogomils or ‘friends of God’ who, being particularly strong in Bulgaria, were also known as the Bougres – whence our durable term of extreme disparagement, ‘buggers’. [3828]

The majority, the rest of the Cathars, the credentes or simply ‘believers’, led relatively normal lives in a normal world, farming and trading, but abstaining from meat, milk, cheese and other animal products, not swearing oaths or engaging in acts of violence. [3844]

Il ruolo delle miniere di Tolfa e Allumiere nella crescita economica della Roma di Papa Giulio II:

Much of the money for his military enterprises came from Italy’s textile industry. The dyeing of cloth requires a fixative, which in the sixteenth century was a mineral, alum. Most alum had come from Turkey, but large deposits of it were to be found north of Rome in an otherwise unremarkable spot named Tolfa. The fortunes of the mines of Tolfa, with their virtual monopoly on the mineral, rose with the textile trade and so were a large source of income for the Papacy. [4308]

L’etimologia di Vaticano:

Another part of its mythic history was that Etruscan priests used to watch for auguries and make prophecies (vaticinia) from this spot. Hence the name ‘Vatican’ for the general area. [4350]

La battuta anti-gesuitica di un Granduca di Toscana:

It was for this reason that the Grand Duke of Tuscany suggested that the Jesuits’ motto, whose initials are IHS, ought to be rendered Iesuiti Habent Satis, ‘The Jesuits have got enough’. [6161]

Che anche Filippo Tommaso Marinetti fosse un ex alunno dei Gesuiti:

He had been schooled by Jesuits, which may well have contributed to his sense of confident exception. This was confirmed when his Jesuit teachers expelled him for cultural rowdiness: he had been passing around copies of Zola’s realist novels. [7776]

Perché il famoso mercato della Vucciria di Palermo si chiami così:

The name of the place derives from the French boucherie […] [8865]

E naturalmente, last but not least, la Bolla Papale che proibiva il tabacco per la sovrapposizione tra sternuto e orgasmo, di cui ho parlato qui:

He also – to descend from the serious to the absurd – issued a Papal Bull, in 1624, that made smoking tobacco punishable by excommunication. The reason was that when smokers sneezed, their convulsion resembled orgasm, and this struck Urban as a mortal sin of the flesh. [5738]

* * *

Hughes ha evidentemente una cultura enciclopedica, e altrettanto evidentemente conosce l’italiano piuttosto approfonditamente (c’è qualche errore e qualche accento mancante, ma nel complesso se la cava bene). Eppure ci sono nel testo alcuni errori pacchiani, che persino un buon editor o un buon correttore di bozze avrebbe potuto scovare: come l’attribuzione a Verdi della Tosca [6689] o l’affermazione che Vittorio Emanuele II fosse figlio (invece che nipote) di Vittorio Emanuele II [8314] o il far seguire temporalmente il bombardamento americano di San Lorenzo a Roma (19 luglio 1943) a quello infernale di Dresda (13-14 febbraio 1945) [8777].

* * *

Ho anche imparato una parola nuova, proleptic: pertaining to prolepsis or anticipation; previous; antecedent.

* * *

Di seguito altre annotazioni sparse, prese durante la lettura, che spaziano dal meditato giudizio estetico all’invettiva al motto di spirito. Vi troverete certamente qualche cosa che v’invoglierà a leggere il libro. Riferimenti numerici all’edizione Kindle.

Here a tangled story begins, with many variants, which tend to circle back to the same themes we will see again and again throughout Rome’s long history: ambition, parricide, fratricide, betrayal and obsessive ambition. Especially the last. No more ambitious city than Rome had ever existed, or conceivably ever will, although New York offers it competition. [331]

The ideal was askesis, ‘inner calm’; the Stoic did not preach indifference or anaesthesia, far from it, but rather a reasoned concentration on the truths of life. [895]

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, wrote Horace, et artes intulit agresti Latio: ‘When Greece was taken she enslaved her rough conqueror, and introduced the arts to cloddish Latium.’ [1404: è sempre stata una delle mie frasi latine preferite]

O lente, lente currite, noctis equi [1832: anche questa, che però è di Ovidio]

The Drunkenness of Noah, complete with the ancient patriarch’s eldest son committing what had become known as the Sin of Ham – not overindulgence in prosciutto crudo, but gazing upon his inebriated father’s nakedness. [4628]

[…] art itself is a lie – a lie told in the service of truth. [5625]

It is a horse made by committee. [5836: è una nota definizione del cammello, di incerta attribuzione]

It is a fabolous concetto, scarcely diminished even by the parked cars that cluster around it, the avvocato Agnelli’s hogs at a trough. [5920: a proposito della fontana del Tritone]

[…] tempus edax. [6582: è l'Ovidio delle Metamorfosi, tempus edax rerum]

This was in imitation of the Roman Senate, which after 212 CE had erased the once honoured but now disgraced name of Geta from a dedicatory inscription on the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Forum Romanum. [6673]

Inevitably, one’s feelings about the singularity of Canova are increased by his isolation within his moment in Italian cultural history; aside from him, that history, at the start of the nineteenth century, was at a low ebb – the lowest it had ever reached, though not as debased as it would be by the start of the twenty-first. [7029]

It is not often that one can say an official document gets everything wrong, but the Syllabus of Errors came as close to that exalted state as anything set forth by the Catholic Church since the death of Luther. [7530]

The modern Catholic theologian Hans Kung, who was appointed official theologian for the Second Vatican Council in 1962, thought that the First Council ‘was so severely compromised’ that its infallibility doctrine was null. ‘Painful and embarrassing as it may be to admit, this council resembled a well-organized and manipulated party congress rather than a free gathering of Christian people.’ Kung would argue that the pope got infallibility translated into dogma for four reasons. ‘Pius IX had a sense of divine mission which he carried to extremes; he engaged in double dealing; he was mentally disturbed; and he misused his office.’ Ludicrously but unsurprisingly, the Church in 1979 banned the impeccably scholarly Kung from ever teaching theology in its name. [7575]

One can have a certain sympathy with the annoyed Italian writer who, when asked if he didn’t agree that Marinetti was a genius, retorted ‘No, he’s a phosphorescent cretin’, but in fact he was less than the first but a good deal more than the second. [7825: il giudizio è di Gabriele D'Annunzio, che peraltro reagiva a Marinetti che l'aveva definito "un cretino con lampi di imbecillità"]

[…] a host of others whose names can never be known because they died too soon for their talent to have a chance to make a mark. [7926: a proposito dei potenziali artisti uccisi nella I guerra mondiale prima che il loro talento si manifestasse]

What he and Marinetti had in common was an ecstatic sense of the possibilities of the modern city – a mighty switchboard of information, manufacture and perception, a social turbine hall, humming away, almost without human interference. [7942: si sta ovviamente parlando di Sant'Elia]
We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an immense, tumultuous construction yard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail; and the Futurist house must be like a gigantic machine. The lifts must no longer be hidden away like tapeworms in the niches of stairwells; the stairs themselves, rendered useless, must be abolished, and the lifts must scale the heights of the façades like serpents of iron and glass. Houses of concrete, glass and iron, stripped of paintings and sculpture, rich only in the innate beauty of their lines and relief, extraordinarily ugly in their mechanical simplicity … must rise on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but plunge down into the earth, with multiple levels … linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and fast, moving pavements. The decorative must be abolished … [7945: forse qui si radica la visione del Centre Pompidou]

[…] ruthless and staggeringly narcissistic Mussolini […] [8071]

Se Rosa, illuminata di alma luce,
La notte in cui fu concepito il Duce,
Avesse al fabbro predappiano,
Invece della fica, presentato l’ano,
L’avrebbe preso in culo quella sera
Rosa soltanto, ma non l’Italia intera.
[8079: l'oscena poesiola è detta in diverse versioni; questa di Hughes ha qualche evidente errore, che ho poco filologicamente corretto]

The sorry truth is that whole cultures, like individual people, do run down; with age, their energies gutter out. They have a collective life, but that life depends entirely on the renewal of individual talent from decade to decade. […] This was not a sudden implosion, but a slow leakage. [8803]

[…] Mario Schifano (1934–98), an ‘Italian Pop’ artist who briefly enjoyed the reputation of being Italy’s answer to Andy Warhol as if an answer were needed! [8901]

[…] the Italian talent for obfuscatory theory. [8910]

[…] the last can of Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista to go on the market fetched the imposing sum of $80,000 – no shit, one is tempted to add. [8934]

What makes it worse is that whoever installed the great sculpture inside the Capitoline deprived it of its base and placed it slantwise, cantilevered out on an inclined ramp. This is vandalism. It is absolutely intrinsic to the meaning of the Marcus Aurelius that the horse and rider should be level and horizontal; otherwise their firm authority is lost. In its new installation, slanting meaninglessly upwards in a way Michelangelo would never have countenanced for an instant, the sculpture becomes a parody of the huge bronze of Peter the Great by the French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet (1716–91), the ‘bronze horseman’ of Pushkin’s poem, riding up his rock in St Petersburg. It would be very hard to imagine a more stupid treatment of a great sculpture than this: ‘design’ run amok, vulgarizing the work it was meant to clarify, ignoring all ancient meanings for the sake of an illusion of ‘relevance’ (to what?) and ‘originality’ (if you don’t know the Falconet). But sadly, that’s Rome now – a city which, to a startling extent, seems to be losing touch with its own nature, and in some respects has surrendered to its own iconic popularity among visitors. [9141]

Many of them see the past as a profitable encumbrance. [9208]

[Matthew Budman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Several years ago, my wife & I spent two weeks in the center of Rome, and it was absolutely magical: a vital, vibrant modern city with something amazing and 2,000 years old around seemingly every corner. There's history everywhere. And I was familiar with almost none of it. In beginning to plan a return visit, I picked up this one-volume history by one of the world's great art and cultural critics; I've been a fan of Hughes' work since the early '90s but had never read either Rome or Barcelona (about one of my other very favorite cities).

It's a magnificent book, covering the events and personalities of some 2,500 years as readably as one could hope. Hughes' narrative encompasses all of it: military campaigns, population migrations, leaders & emperors & caesars & popes & Il Duce & Berlusconi, and political alliances, all alongside a visual and cultural history—architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, philosophy—that is, as the subtitle promises, personal. From the beginning, Hughes makes it clear his account will be opinionated, and it is, often delightfully so: He gives us a great sense of which emperor and pope accomplished noteworthy things and which were simply megalomaniacs, which poets and artists and architects left grand legacies and which are (un)justifiably obscure today, which of the city's storied locations remain powerful and resonant today. There's so much material—so much history!—that it's hard to take in more than a chapter at a sitting.

The epilogue, with Hughes lamenting the dire cultural state of modern Rome—with no great postwar artists (save Fellini) in any medium, dumbed down by the world's stupidest TV programming, and overrun by tourists ruining the viewing experience—is so brilliantly savage that it begs to be read aloud, albeit while wincing. The prose sends off the reader on an energetic note. However compromised the experience of visiting Rome today compared to the "grand tour" that ambitious artists and noblemen took in the 18th century, I can't wait to go back.