Rome

One of our greatest art and cultural critics now takes on Rome’s complicated history as a city, an empire, an origin of Western art and civilization, and as his own inspiration.

Robert Hughes opens this authoritative, searingly smart history with his own arrival in Rome in 1958, as a wide-eyed twenty-year-old from Australia. We see him blissfully plunging into the life of the city, his exhilaration palpable on the page, his life-long passion for the place bursting into being. And then he shares the breadth of that passion with detailing the city’s physical, political, social, and artistic evolution through the ages from its foundation to its present moment, discussing government, religion, architecture, painting, sculpture, and cinema, providing in-depth portraits of political and cultural figures (from Caesar to Mussolini and from Cicero to Fellini). Finally, he brings us up to the twenty-first century to regale us with his impressions of a city he now sees run rampant with mass and tourist culture.

Sometimes loving, sometimes enraged, never less than impassioned, sharply discerning, and delectably opinionated, Robert Hughes gives us the great city of Rome as only he can.