The hills of Rome
Subtitle: signature of an eternal city
By: Caroline Vout
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge
Language: eng
Number of pages: 284
ISBN-13: 9781107025974
Subjects: Description and travel; History
Description: "Rome is 'the city of seven hills'. This book examines the need for the 'seven hills' cliché, its origins, development, impact and borrowing. It explores how the cliché relates to Rome's real terrain and how it is fundamental to the way in which we define this. Its chronological remit is capacious: Varro, Virgil and Claudian at one end, and on, through the work of Renaissance antiquarians, to embrace frescoes and nineteenth-century engravings. These artists and authors celebrated the hills, and the views from the these hills, in an attempt to capture Rome holistically. By studying their efforts, this book confronts the problems of encapsulating Rome and 'citiness' more broadly and indeed the artificiality of any representation, whether a painting, poem or map. In this sense, it is not a history of the city at any moment in time, but a history of how the city has been, and has to be, perceived"--provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the journey to Rome; title: The map; title: The itinerary; title: The 'take home' message; title: The lie of the land; title: The seven hills of Rome, republic and empire; title: After the high Roman fashion; title: The renaissance of the seven hills; title: Nineteenth and twentieth-century encounters; title: Seven is the magic number; title: An invention of tradition; title: The potency and possibility of the number seven; title: Varro's contribution to the story; title: Before the mountains were settled; title: Rome, la città eterna; title: The seven hills and the ambitions of empire; title: Dizzy heights under the Flavians; title: The rise and fall of Rome in late antiquity; title: Postscript; title: Painting by numbers; title: The limits of representation; title: The seven hills of renaissance artists and patrons; title: Nineteenth-century ways of seeing; title: On top of the world; title: Villas and gardens; title: In the thick of it; title: Getting the measure of the whole of Rome; title: Framing a view from the Capitoline or Palatine; title: The imperial gaze; title: Divine omniscience; title: Signing off; title: The history of an idea; title: Geography as history.