Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History by Robert Hughes

Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History Reviews

• 
  Grace Tjan

  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

  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

  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

  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

  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

  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

  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

  "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

  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.
• 
  Ed Ward

  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

  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.
  
• 
  Amy

  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.
• 
  Gaylord Dold

  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

  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

  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.
• 
  Rob Atkinson

  * 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

  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

  “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

  This book is as wonderful as the city he describes.
  
• 
  Ufuk

  Contains lots of anecdotes but is not really the "rich blend of history, art and travelogue" like the Sunday Times tries to make us believe.
  Hughes' knowledge of ancient antiquity is not that good because it contains quite some mistakes. From the Renaissance on (chapter 6) till the end it's much better.
  It is quite obvious that Mr. Hughes is not a historian. He easily compares all kind of historical facts / persons with things in the present. That is something you should be careful with especially when it is not based on facts. History is not a hard science and should be viewed in the context of its own time.
  I never wrote a review that long in Goodreads but the main reason why I am doing it now is the fact that the Epilogue completely pissed me off. First of all, Mr. Hughes is disturbed by the fact that Rome is getting busier and busier and somehow the whole "touristic thing" is getting out of hand. In a trip down memory lane he mentions how it was more than 50 years ago.... So what? Welcome to reality Mr. Hughes. As a writer, art critic etc. he should know that the world is changing and that it is getting busier. There are a few billion people more than in 1959. And yes, the Russians and the Chinese also come and want to visit the beautiful Sistine Chapel. At least they some some interest in the cultural heritage of Italy. And yes, when a museum is crowded it does get a bit noisy sometimes but to write in a book "Otherwise, just shut the fuck up, please pretty please, if you can, if you don't mind, if you won't burst" is highly unprofessional. I have been to the Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel four times and I didn't see or hear tourists being loud and misbehaving.
  Second: the Epilogue is a huge insult to the Italian people. Mr. Hughes is frustrated with his idea that Italians don't give a "rat's ass" about their own culture and history (... "as a good molto tipico Italian and nice enough guy, do not personally give a rat's ass".) The Italians, according to Hughes, only care about how cool Silvio Berlusconi is with his "harem of blondies for his quiz shows", other cheap Italian shows on t.v. and football. He also writes that most Italians are "artistic illiterates". And then to weaken his own argument he writes "Most people anywhere are (= artistic illiterates); why should Italians be any different?" Really Mr. Hughes? Then WHY mention it? Not everybody studied art, so yes, there are lots of things people don't understand, but at least let them try to enjoy art and maybe it is a beginning of something nice. How many New Yorkers went to the Guggenheim and understand the art of the architecture of the building by Frank Lloyd Wright? How many Australians went to the Campbelltown Arts Centre and really understood the Aboriginal art? Long story short: people in general, all over the world only care about sports and late night shows with bimbo blondes with fake boobies and cushion lips. Although there might be some truth in that I don't see that you have to bother readers with this "info" in a book about Rome.
  My rating went from "really liked it" to "liked it" and after reading the Epilogue to "it was ok". Besides some nice anecdotes and historical fun facts (which you have to check!!) it doesn't deserve more than "o.k.".
• 
  John Newton

  Wonderful and opinionated, but there are a few things that stop me from giving it five stars. First, if you are thinking this might be a book that will help you understand the development of Rome over the ages, this isn't really it. If you don't come to it with a rough understanding of the geography of Rome already, you may be lost. I was expecting more of a sense of different neighborhoods and streets, but it's not a book that explains the city through that lens.
  
  Instead, it is a cultural history of Rome, or perhaps better (at least in sections), "Rome," the idea and what it has come to represent in western culture. Thus we get many more words on artists like Poussin and Velazquez who only visited the city than on its medieval churches. (In general, Hughes skips right over the middle ages pretty quickly, leaping from ancient Rome to the Renaissance in a way that feels somewhat dated now). He is also dismissive of contemporary Italian art, which is his right, of course, but anyone who wants to understand Rome's contemporary art scene (especially beyond cinema, which he does cover somewhat) will have to look elsewhere.
  
  The line between a cultural history of Rome and one of Italy can get blurry. In the section that covers the Renaissance, much of the action and much of Hughes's book is taking place in Florence. Detours lead to Jerusalem, Avignon, Venice and sometimes the links back to Hughes's nominal subject can feel like they are stretched thin.
  
  Finally, while this isn't as much of a history of the city as you might expect from the title, the failure to include a map of the city (at least in the edition I read, perhaps they added one to later editions or the paperback) is unfortunate. It would have been helpful.
• 
  Patrick

  Trying to encompass 2500 years of history in one volume is no easy task, and Hughes does a decent job of hitting the high spots. Though there are discussions of the political developments in Rome (particularly during the Roman Republic and Empire), they are there largely to give context to the history of Roman art and architecture, which is Hughes' forte and the real subject of the book. Hughes is a fine writer, but the book is tedious at time, and, as is natural in a book of this scope, there is no particular through line from one period, or one artist, to another, so that there is nothing particularly compelling to draw the reader forward.
  
  Two major drawbacks of the book: 1) No maps, so you never have any idea of what the relationship between all of the neighborhoods and architectural pieces is; and 2) compared with the number of artists and works discussed, there are very few photos - this should have been lavishly illustrated so that the reader could compare Hughes' descriptions with visual representations.