Book Description

This volume brings together a collection of essays that explore the cultural history and representation of Rome from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The essays address diverse aspects of Rome as a subject and site of Romantic experience and commentary, investigating the legacy of the Grand Tour, and the changing face of Rome in the early nineteenth century. The contributions range across various media, genres, and topics - the Roman art market, paintings of contemporary Romans and their interpretation, music in and 'of' Rome, the evolution of nineteenth-century guidebooks, novels which take Rome as their narrative mise-en-scène, the idea of Rome as a setting for creative activity, ruins as polysemic metaphor, women and the reception of antiquity, the aesthetics of urban hygiene, and the mythology of that renowned quarter of Rome, Trastevere. In different ways, all of the contributions to this volume contribute to our understanding of the relationship between Rome's changing identity and the evolving forms of literary and artistic representation employed to record, evoke, commemorate, or make sense of the city, its people, and landscape.