A solid historical tour of Ancient Rome. The photographs are good, and the scale-model representations of the Eternal City are fascinating. But the book doesn't really convey the larger context of its subject. It falls short, both in terms of placing individual sites in the larger framework of the city, historic and present, and evoking what these ruins really mean, in Roman culture and our own. Still, there's plenty to capture the imagination here--it's a sound souvenir piece.