[Rome and The Guidebook Tradition] Introduction

2019

Almost everyone has used a guidebook, when travelling or in the armchair at home. But how and when was the guidebook born? In this book, seven scholars from various disciplines argue that the guide ...

2019

and the Bibliotopography of Rome "How great Rome was, these ruins teach us"-Nam quanta Roma fuit ipsa ruina docet-Francesco Albertini wrote in his guidebook to Rome published in 1510. 1 The fact is, however, that the ruins taught Albertini next to nothing. Albertini was a scholar from Florence who needed the help of an expert, the antiquarian Andrea Fulvio, to be able to orientate himself in Rome at all. What the sentence, therefore, teaches us is that Rome in Renaissance guidebooks, above all, is a rhetorical constructiona unit born from books and not from buildings. This essay analyzes two Renaissance guidebooks, namely Francesco Albertini's Opusculum and Bartolomeo Marliano's Topographia from 1534, from a novel angle. Both guidebooks have in common a structuring of respective texts that reorganized real, sprawling Rome into a captivating albeit ideal order, which, in turn, formed the perception of travelers, fueled the imagination of patrons, and possibly also spurred city planners into action. Guides made Rome intelligible as a form. The idea of Rome as the "Eternal City"as a resurrected imperial urbs and the Second Jerusalemarguably thrived better in conditions that were textual than in the reality of sorry ruins and crooked alleyways. It was in fact printed guides that first formulated the idea of a new Rome, a recast metropolis emancipating from the debris of the legacy of the ancients. The idea of "newness," however, was borrowed, I argue, from bookmaking itselffrom numeric order, indexed content, and from the repeatability and standardization of mechanized typography. 2 Moreover, guidebooks promoted not only a new city but also a new man, one who was no longer lost in reveries about the past but at work calculating the city's circumference (Albertini) and plotting its heights (Marliano). This essay aims to define the novelty of these two guides by using the concept of bibliotopography, a concept I have invented in order to describe how the book and the city artfully overlap. Arguably, the texts of Albertini and Marliano are both bibliotopographies, that is to say structured in imitation of ideal city layouts, but as I will demonstrate, they qualify as such in very different ways. 1 The quote appears in the introduction to Book III. Sebastiano Serlio repeats the phrase in the frontispiece to Book III of I sette libri dell'architettura, published in 1540. The ultimate reference for the dictum is probably alluding to Hildebert de Lavardin's twelfth-century poem Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina; Quam magni fueris integra fracta doces (Carmina minora 36). 2 On this theme, see for instance Eisenstein (1979/2009) 80-88.

Rome and The Guidebook Tradition From the Middle Ages to the 20th Century, 2019

Ludwig Schudt’s "Le Guide di Roma. Materialen zu einer Geschichte der römischen Topographie" was and still is a pioneering bibliography within the field of research into early modern guidebooks to Rome. Traditions, however, are constructions in which historical events are moulded into a pattern and valued accordingly by the historian; this is also the case with Ludwig Schudt’s bibliography. In fact, it was heavily dependent on a manuscript bibliography of early modern guidebooks to Rome, compiled by Oskar Pollak, who therefore holds a crucial but hitherto neglected position in the preparatory process, and thus also in the final product. This article presents new sources on Pollak himself and his way of working, and argues that both selection and subsequent analysis of the genre are the result of concepts and values of judgement that pertained to the discipline of art history in the period around 1900. From this, it also follows that the Guide di Roma can no longer be considered an authoritative study of early modern guidebooks without taking into account how the historical codification of this genre around 1900 deviates from present-day criteria of what a guidebook is, and how its genre developed under the influence of early modern travel cultures and cultural exchange.

Rome and the Guidebook Tradition, 2019

This essay aims to define the novelty of Renaissance guidebooks to Rome, exemplified by Francesco Albertini's "Opusculum" (1510) and Bartolomeo Marlianio's "Topographia" (1534) by using the concept of bibliotopography. The article launches the concept in order to describe how the book and the city artfully overlap. Arguably, the texts of Albertini and Marliano are both bibliotopographies, that is to say structured in imitation of ideal city layouts, but as the article demonstrates, they qualify as such in very different ways.

Rome and the Guidebook Tradition from the Middle Ages to the 20th Century, 2019

The guidebook is not merely a registration of the city and its historical evolution or of the changing preferences of visitors but a device that selects and arranges aspects of the city – real as well as imaginary – into a coherent representation of that city. This is particularly the case in Rome, a city composed of three different entities: the ancient, Christian and – from the second half of the seventeenth century onward – modern capital, each with their own monuments and histories. From the sixteenth century onwards, Roman guidebooks employ the categories of ‘Roma antica’, ‘Roma sacra’ and ‘Roma moderna’ to define and represent these three components. In this essay, we argue that the changing application of these labels in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth century reflects not only the far-going physical transformation of the city over that period but also new ways of thinking about the identity of Rome. The reconfiguration of the three ‘Romes’ in the space of the guidebook, operated by means of a continuous rearrangement of sections, illustrations and descriptions, illustrates how successive authors and publishers attempted to fit the three well-established categories onto reality. An examination of how English visitors reacted to Rome will demonstrate how effective the categories of ‘Roma antica’, ‘sacra’ and ‘moderna’ were in organizing the perception of the contemporary city and its analogs.

Academia Letters

Academia Letters preprint.

Scholastic Culture in the Hellenistic and Roman Eras, 2019

The second-century medical author Galen, at the beginning of his treatise 'On My Own Books', gives a lively picture of book-based literary dispute in central Rome. The setting is not one of the great libraries or lecture halls nearbythough Galen certainly also used and talked about thesebut among the commercial booksellers of a nearby street: ἐν γάρ τοι τῷ Σανδαλρίῳ, καθ᾽ ὃ δὴ πλεῖστα τῶν ἐν Ῥώμη βιβλιοπωλείων ἐστὶν, ἐθεασάμεθά τινας ἀμφιβητοῦντας εἴτ᾽ἐμὸν εἴη τὸ πιπρασκόμενον αὐτὸ βιβλἰον εἴτ᾽ἄλλου τινός· ἐπεγέγραπτο δὴ γὰρ, Γαληνὸς ἰατρός· ὠνουμένου δέ τινος ὡς ἐμὸν ὑπὸ τοῦ ξένου τῆς ἐπιγραφῆς κινηθείς τις ἀνὴρ τῶν φιλολόγων ἐβουλήθη γνῶναι τὴν ἐπαγγελίαν αὐτοῦ· καὶ δύο τοὺς πρώτους στίχους ἀναγνοὺς εὐθέως ἀπέρῥιψε τὀ γράμμα, τοῦτο μόνον ἐπιφθεγξάμενος ὡς οὐχ ἔστι λέξις αὕτη Γαληνοῦ καὶ ψευδῶς ἐπιγέγραπται τουτὶ τὸ βιβλόν. I was recently in the Vicus Sandaliarius, the area of Rome with the largest concentration of booksellers, where I witnessed a dispute as to whether a certain book for sale was by me or someone else. The book bore the title Galen the Doctor. Someone had bought the book under the impression that it was one of mine; someone elsea man of lettersstruck by the odd form of the title, desired to know the book's subject. On reading the first two lines he immediately tore up the inscription, saying simply: 'This is not Galen's languagethe title is false.' (Galen, On My Own Books 1)¹ This chapter was given as a paper at the conference 'Ancient Scholarship: Scholastic Culture in the Hellenistic and Roman Eras', held at University of Glasgow in April 2017. I am very grateful to the organisers, Sean Adams and Zanne Domoney-Little, for their invitation to speak, and help and patience with this contribution, and to the other delegates (including authors in the present volume) for their useful and generous suggestions.

Library Trends, 2012

Vous dites: il faudrait montrer dans ce livre le rôle que peut jouer Rome dans la vie d'un homme à Paris; on pourrait imaginer ces deux villes superposées l'une à l'autre, l'une souterraine par rapport à l'autre, avec des trappes de communication que certains seulement connaîtraient sans qu'aucun sans doute parvînt à les connaître toutes, de telle sorte que pour aller d'un lieu à l'autre il pourrait y avoir certains raccourcis ou détours inattendus, de telle sorte que la distance d'un point à un autre, le trajet d'un point à un autre, serait modifié selon la connaissance, la familiarité que l'on aurait de cette autre ville, de telle sorte que toute localisation serait double, l'espace romain déformant plus ou moins pour chacun l'espace parisien, autorisant rencontres ou induisant en pièges.-Michel Butor, La Modification (1957)