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"Is 21st-century Rome a global city? Is it part of Europe's core or periphery? This volume examines the "real city" beyond Rome's historical center, exploring the diversity and challenges of life in neighborhoods affected by immigration, neoliberalism, formal urban planning, and grassroots social movements. The contributors engage with themes of contemporary urban studies-the global city, the self-made city, alternative modernities, capital cities and nations, urban change from below, and sustainability. Global Rome serves as a provocative introduction to the Eternal City and makes an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship"--

Government Information Quarterly 8 (1991) 325-328. doi:10.1016/0740-624X(91)90069-K ; Received by publisher: 0000-01-01 ; Harvest Date: 2016-01-04 12:22:43 ; DOI:10.1016/0740-624X(91)90069-K ; Page Range: 325-328

APPROVED ; This thesis has undertaken two main complementary lines of research: firstly, it has looked afresh at the evidence for urban fires in Rome as presented by the written sources and, secondly, it has reimagined the city as an urban fire regime. Using this new conceptual tool, the fires of Rome are a conduit through which to view the history, architecture, politics, economy, religion, and social and psychological well-being of the city. Each of the 88 fires recorded in the annalistic sources from 460 BC to AD 410 is re-examined. As first principle, the interrogation of the sources begins with the language. By looking at the vocabulary, in both Latin and Greek, of each source from different time periods for every fire, what has, and what has not, been recorded is identified. Previous translation and interpretation of that information has been challenged in a number of cases. Close reading of the language has also identified a vocabulary of destruction which fits precisely with what modern fire science tells us about the behaviour of fire in an urban context. The thesis argues that the Romans knew with great accuracy the predicted effect of fire on streetscapes, structures and building materials. Systematic close reading of the texts has highlighted a number of other interrelated factors: the cause, extent, location, and the frequency of fires in certain areas, are all collated under each fire and analysed further in a broad statistical analysis. How much or how little is really known, even in the case of fires where the sources appear to give substantial information, has been demonstrated under each fire and also represented graphically in case studies. The typology of a fire regime has been used to fill in the gaps between the recorded fires, and to reimagine fires as a continuum, a lived experience in the city. This has led to challenging assumptions about how flammable Rome actually was, and the extent our own view of fires, and how to deal with them, has coloured our interpretation of fires in Rome. The causes of fire, efforts to prevent and retard fire, have all been examined in detail using comparative data from more recently documented fires together with modern research in the field of fire science. Recent technological studies show that assumptions about the flammability of wooden structures, as well as the effect of fire on concrete and stone, must be re-evaluated. Evidence is presented that the Romans were acutely conscious of the causes and preventability of fires; they knew how to retard fire in terms of building materials, construction, legislation, civic responsibility and, of course, prayer. It is also argued that the role of water in fire-fighting in Rome must be reassessed, particularly in the work of the Vigiles. Our understanding of the Vigiles has been coloured by the modern view of a ?fire brigade? and this thesis has debated assumptions about their role among the other urban cohorts. Modern research has also been used to challenge the silence of our sources and to glimpse the human experience of fire in Rome in terms of loss, grief, and trauma; the attitude of a ruling elite to the victims of disaster is also explored. The ecological pattern of fire is cyclical: it destroys and regenerates. New buildings and districts rose out of the ashes of the old and reconstruction was then, as now, a political act imbued with ideological meaning. Fires acted as a catalyst for change, were used to shape the streetscape, and allowed leaders to build in their own image and likeness. Finally, it is contended that reconstruction after major fires provided much needed employment to the urban poor and, thus, had a positive socio-economic affect.

Kleijn, G. de The Water Supply of Ancient Rome. City Area, Water, and Population. 2001 The Aqua Appia (312 BC) was the first of the eleven aqueducts leading to Rome to be built in antiquity. Time and again, the volume of water brought into the city was increased through the construction of new aqueducts. Rome's population and the extent of its built-up area also changed over time. This study examines how data derived from our knowledge of the urban water supply in antiquity may help answering questions about the urban social fabric and topography. DMAHA 22 (2001), 365 p. Cloth. - 68.00 EURO, ISBN: 9050632688

According to one narrative, that received almost canonical status a century ago with Francis Haverfield, the orthogonal grid was the most important development of ancient town planning, embodying values of civilization in contrast to barbarism, diffused in particular by hundreds of Roman colonial foundations, and its main legacy to subsequent urban development was the model of the grid city, spread across the New World in new colonial cities. This book explores the shortcomings of that all too colonialist narrative and offers new perspectives. It explores the ideals articulated both by ancient city founders and their modern successors; it looks at new evidence for Roman colonial foundations to reassess their aims; and it looks at the many ways post-Roman urbanism looked back to the Roman model with a constant re-appropriation of the idea of the Roman.

Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome is an investigation of Renaissance diplomacy in practice. Presenting the first book-length study of this subject for sixty years, Catherine Fletcher substantially enhances our understanding of the envoy's role during this pivotal period for the development of diplomacy. Uniting rich but hitherto unexploited archival sources with recent insights from social and cultural history, Fletcher argues for the centrality of the papal court - and the city of Rome - in the formation of the modern European diplomatic system. The book addresses topics such as the political context from the return of the popes to Rome, the 1454 Peace of Lodi and after 1494 the Italian Wars; the assimilation of ambassadors into the ceremonial world; the prescriptive literature; trends in the personnel of diplomacy; an exploration of travel and communication practices; the city of Rome as a space for diplomacy; and the world of gift-giving--