Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim

by Herbert L. Kessler

This book combines history and art history in very readable form. It is through an imagined woman's eyes that the authors and the reader see and are affected by the religious sites and rituals of Rome 1300 (e.g., the night-long procession of the icon of Christ from the Lateran to join the icon of Mary at S. Maria Maggiore across the city). The purpose of the book is to present medieval Rome as a living environment, to show how the major churches and the sacred relics, frescoes, icons, and mosaics within them actually served in the Middle Ages to attract the faithful and to confirm and teach belief among the throngs of pilgrims who flocked to the eternal city. The authors not only look back at what pilgrims ventured to see in Rome during the first Jubilee but forward to the Holy Year of 2000, when an estimated 45 million Catholics will retrace the steps of their forebears in search of plenary absolution.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2000

Reviews

[John Isles · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book attempts to reconstruct what an imaginary pilgrim sees in Rome in the first Jubilee Year, 1300, as she visits the principal churches. (Remains of ancient Rome are largely ignored.) The narrative is in the present tense, but I found this to jar with the captions to the illustrations, which describe what survives today also in the present tense. A few illustrations are in color; most are black-and-white, but these include some old photographs, taken before recent restorations, that bring us closer to the earlier appearance. I noted a few misprints and some confusion in cross-references among the illustrations. The map of Rome by Paolino Veneto on p. 12 is poorly reproduced; a much better copy is to be found in Jessica Maier's book "The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps."

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

In spite of the rather hokey device of pretending to write the book from the perspective of a pilgrim in the year 1300 (and assuming all sorts of things about her, e.g. literacy and intimate knowledge not only of Biblical stories and various apocryphal legends, but also of artists, building practices and other things related to the churches of Rome), the book ended up being far more enjoyable than a first glance promised. It was lovely to revisit some of my favourite Roman churches such as St Clemente and Sta Prassede in text and image, and to make acquaintance with other places that I have yet to visit in person, such as the Lateran Baptistry. As with virtually any book related to Rome it brings about in me the desire to return a presto.

[Tim Evanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's difficult to imagine what it must have like for someone to visit Rome in the early 1500s, as the Renaissance was beginning.

Rome had a population perhaps as great as 1.2 million during the reign of Caesar Augustus (27 BC to 14 AD). That included women, children, and slaves. But the Gothic Wars and other disasters depopulated the city. It probably had no more than 500,000 residents in the early 400s, and it rapidly declined during that century and the next until its population was no more than 50,000 by 700 AD.

When the Renaissance began in the mid 1300s, Rome's population was even lower.

Imagine the city that Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, or Donatello saw...

This book tries to do just that. Rather than provide a description of the city as a whole, authors Herbert Kessler and Johanna Zacharias provide the reader with a framing device: What if you were a pilgrim visting Rome during the Jubilee year of 1300? And what if the pilgrim arrived on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption? What would she see?

The pilgrim would have begun at the Lateran, seeing the Patriarchum and the Sancta Sanctorum. As the procession moves to the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, the pilgrim would visit the Church of San Clemente, the Forum, and the Church of Saint Prassede. They envision the pilgrim leaving Rome and seeing the twin basilicas of St. Paul Outside the Walls and St. Peter's.

This oversize book is lavishly illustrated with both black-and-white and color photos, some of them dating to the mid-1800s in order to give the reader a flavor of what these churches looked like before their 20th century restorations. There are extensive drawings from the 1200s, 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s as well, and reproductions of now-destroyed works (based on textual descriptions).

The level of detail devoted to each church, mural, statue, and icon is extremely deep. At times, the casual reader might be overwhelmed by it, especially since the iconography of the Middle Ages is so different from the way the modern person approaches art (religious and secular). Nevertheless, the prose is easy to read and the book moves along at a rapid pace.

There isn't much sense of what daily life in Rome was like in 1300, which is kind of a pity since the book lacks the context that would really make the city come alive for the "pilgrim" (and the reader).