Claridge - Rome: an Oxford Archaeological Guide

Oxford Archaeological Guides
General Editor: Barry Cunliffe

Rome

Amanda Claridge is Professor of Roman Archaeology at Royal Holloway University of London. Assistant Director of the British School at Rome from 1980 to 1994, her wider archaeological activities have included fieldwork in Rome, elsewhere in Italy, North Africa, and Turkey, and the study of Roman marbles and sculptural techniques, on which she is a noted authority.

Barry Cunliffe is Professor Emeritus of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford. The author of over forty books, including The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe and The Ancient Celts, he has served as President of the Council for British Archaeology and the Society of Antiquaries, and is currently a member of the Ancient Monuments Board of English Heritage.
We have long needed what no one before Claridge has provided: a synthesis, balanced and user-friendly, of all [the] recent scholarship, one that sets Roman monuments in their proper urban and historical contexts, and accurately describes what is currently known or thought about them.... [T]ravellers... will welcome a synthesis so balanced, intelligent and well informed, and will find Amanda Claridge a fine companion on their archaeological walks in Rome.
JOHN H. DARMS
Times Literary Supplement

If you really want to know what youre looking at when you visit Rome, this book is a must for your suitcase! It is brisk, erudite, academic but highly accessible and fascinating.
Amazon.co.uk review

Oxford Archaeological Guides

An Oxford Archaeological Guide

Amanda Claridge

with contributions by
Judith Toms and Tony Cubberley
SECOND EDITION
Revised and expanded

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Amanda Claridge 1998, 2010

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Travelling for pleasure, whether for curiosity, nostalgia, religious conviction, or simply to satisfy an inherent need to learn, has been an essential part of the human condition for centuries. Chaucers Wife of Bath ranged wide, visiting Jerusalem three times as well as Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Cologne, and Boulogne. Her motivation, like that of so many medieval travellers, was primarily to visit holy places. Later, as the Grand Tour took a hold in the eighteenth century, piety was replaced by the need felt by the lite to educate its young, to compensate for the disgracefully inadequate training offered at that time by Oxford and Cambridge. The levelling effect of the Napoleonic Wars changed all that and in the age of the steamship and the railway mass tourism was born when Mr Thomas Cook first offered A Great Circular Tour of the Continent.

There have been guidebooks as long as there have been travellers. Though not intended as such, the Histories of Herodotus would have been an indispensable companion to a wandering Greek. Centuries later Pausanias guide to the monuments of Greece was widely used by travelling Romans intent on discovering the roots of their civilization. In the eighteenth century travel books took on a more practical form offering a torrent of useful advice, from dealing with recalcitrant foreign innkeepers to taking a plentiful supply of oil of lavender to ward off bedbugs. But it was the incomparable Baedekers that gave enlightenment and reassurance to the increasing tide of enquiring tourists who flooded the Continent in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The battered but much-treasured red volumes may still sometimes be seen in use today, pored over on sites by those nostalgic for the gentle art of travel.

The needs and expectations of the enquiring traveller change rapidly and it would be impossible to meet them all within the compass of single volumes. With this in mind, the Oxford Archaeological Guides have been created to satisfy a particular and growing interest. Each volume provides lively and informed descriptions of a wide selection of archaeological sites chosen to display the cultural heritage of the country in question. Plans, designed to match the text, make it easy to grasp the full extent of the site while focusing on its essential aspects. The emphasis is, necessarily, on seeing, understanding, and above all enjoying the particular place. But archaeological sites are the creation of history and can only be fully appreciated against the longue dure of human achievement. To provide this, each book begins with a wide-ranging historical overview introducing the changing cultures of the country and the landscapes which formed them. Thus, while the Guides are primarily intended for the traveller they can be read with equal value at home.

Barry Cunliffe

This book would not have happened without the generous input of friends and colleagues: Tony Cubberley, whose original idea it was, did a lot of the initial groundwork and also provided bibliography and quotations; Sheila Gibsons unmistakable hand is not only responsible for many of the more familiar illustrations but also many new ones. Mark Wilson Jones donated his masterly drawings of the orders of Romes Corinthian temples; Janet DeLaine put me straight on the Baths of Caracalla and much else; Margareta Steinby kindly let me see the articles in her new