One's notion of Ionia comprises not only what is visible in art, books and buildings, but also ‘sunburn and mosquito bites, the “musky” odour of snakes, the fragrance of citrus and jasmine, bird-calls, camel-bells, raucous music, coffee, honey, sour wine, brackish water, [and] a vigorous massage’ (p. 98). Many visitors to famous ruins went forearmed with literary accounts, but this knowledge could be enhanced by other kinds of sensory information. As objects can be constituted by multiple kinds of perception, S.'s monograph shows us that encounters with antiquity are both performative and individual. Hence there exist ‘as many ancient worlds as there are recipients’ (p. 210). In fascinating case studies of embodied experience S. identifies patterns of engagement with classical things and places that enrich our sense of how antiquity was constructed during the long eighteenth century.

It is difficult to separate the modes of sensory interaction that can occur simultaneously, but that is the point. Eighteenth-century scholars considered vision – associated with empiricism and rationality – the most important sense, yet E. Burke's interest in bodily responses to what is seen had complicated the theoretical picture. S.'s chapter on Emma Hamilton accounts of a figure who ostensibly performed for others to see, both as painters’ muse and in the ‘attitudes’ in which she enacted classical personae. While S. describes Hamilton ‘bringing antiquity alive for her spectators’ (p. 26), it seems equally true to say that the artist herself enjoyed a kind of classical reception unavailable to the viewers as she assumed characters and interacted physically with ancient props. S. deliberates on ownership of these performances and on objectification of Hamilton. Where there is a fleeting reference to a salon setting, I would have welcomed more information on specifics. How many saw each performance, and why were they admitted? How far or near were they from Hamilton? To what extent were the ‘attitudes’ impromptu, as in B. de Boigne's recollection of being included unexpectedly (pp. 29–30)? Was Hamilton really adopting ‘unfamiliar physicalities’ (p. 26), or might she have thought herself a Medea in some ways, with commonalities between the characters she assumed?

The lack of a statement by Hamilton on her performances compels us to speculation and represents an obstacle for S. Clearly the subject of the book requires examples that are not only written reflections on the function of art, but in some cases the available material does not quite do what the monograph needs. Of Charlotte Eaton's account of Rome we are told that ‘haptic analogies act as entry points for sympathetic appreciation and starting points for reflecting on lived experience in antiquity’ (p. 53). Yet in a Gothic Revival narrative of the catacombs, Eaton's sensations appear to fulfil the responses that the tourist has been promised or prescribed in guidebooks. Many of the quotations from Eaton's Rome in the Nineteenth Century answer to that title by attention to the Christian present and to ‘frowning and roofless ruins’ (p. 52) as they stand to modern visitors rather than the ‘lived experience’ of ancient inhabitants. More rewarding are the points at which Eaton engages with a site's historic associations. This chapter is best where S. finds Eaton challenging dubious claims about particular places or reflecting that the city represents layered histories. In such episodes we see the barriers to imagining a particular historical moment. While the tourist struggled to identify one Roman past among the multiple Romes manifested, tour guides forged histories in order to enhance their itineraries with illustrious associations.

The chapters on J.G. Herder and J.W. Goethe are more straightforward: in these S. explores texts that implicitly or explicitly theorise about encounters with ancient culture. For Herder the viewer's primary response to sculpture is physical, and appreciation of three-dimensional art is vital to inform taste. Herder's viewer is ‘kinaesthetically attuned’ (p. 42) to the object of contemplation in a somewhat Burkean manner, responding somatically although motionless. This silent process constitutes a component of aesthetic education. In Goethe's Roman Elegies, sex is a way to know the past. If the poet neglects to appreciate his surroundings, which he negotiates impatiently to reach his lover, the same could be said of Ovid, whose elegiac mode of love is re-enacted by Goethe's character. Props, disguise and role-play enhance the poet's connection to the past. By now S. has established theatricality as central to lived moments of classical reception.

A subsequent set of chapters focuses on physical objects. In a useful contrast with C. Montesquieu, S. demonstrates the importance of materiality to E. Gibbon's Decline and Fall: that the text was not only (as the origin myth goes) suggested by a melancholy visit to the Capitol, but remains anchored in Gibbon's apprehension of the city of Rome as a physical space. Gibbon's sentiments on the Capitol followed a tradition of emotive engagement with ruins established by the Dilettanti, although S. notes that the architectural instruction offered by Dilettanti texts centred on practical knowledge of the sites which was literally ‘hands-on’.

In Britain, the fad for old statues gained urgency during the eighteenth century. Dedicated collectors wished for their display spaces to evoke classical atmospheres of various kinds. Imported statues were often fragmentary, and apparently coherent items on display might have been assembled from various sources, with a stray buttock and unknown head having been added to the torso of a Venus, for example, and sold as complete in 1764 (p. 108). S. reports a belief that such procedures demonstrated ‘respect’ for artefacts, ‘realising … [their] aesthetic potential’ (p. 109). This discussion would benefit from relation to contemporary debates on the fragment. The rage for restoration of old statues appears to have arisen after Bessborough's tour in the 1730s, as we are told that he left his relics as found (p. 117). Elgin obtained the Parthenon Sculptures in 1811, but these were not restored, begging the question of whether different standards were applied to different things or whether a former preference for the fragmentary had by then resumed. The significance of the faux-classical domestic settings commissioned by devoted collectors could also be pursued. Enthusiasts such as Thomas Hope, living in private exhibition spaces, appear to have spent a great deal of time in imagined pasts. If such collectors’ personal lives were thus performances, I would be curious to learn how they perceived their own identities or authentic selves, or where a distinction might be made between appreciation and role play. Questions of purpose arise in the discussion of museums too. From S. we understand J.J. Winckelmann's careful staging of one's visit to the Vatican, but why does a Catholic institution intend the viewer to have an ‘epiphanic’ experience of a pagan statue (p. 136)?

S.'s account of the triumphal procession in which Napoleon's forces brought Roman relics to the Louvre demonstrates that the crowd could be excited by ancient items even when invisible within crates. This leads to an examination of vicariousness and refraction in fiction. In G. de Staël's Corinne ‘architecture [is] a vehicle for seduction’ (p. 157). More mysteriously, the ‘balmy’ climate is necessary to ‘activate the magnetism of Italy's remains’ (p. 161). Similarly, the Greek monuments in F. Hölderlin's Hyperion are living things in an ‘animist cosmos’ (p. 175). While Hölderlin had never travelled to Greece, Mary Shelley's The Last Man commemorates a Byronic mode of solitary travel that had ended in her lifetime. The surge in tourism that followed Waterloo made an intimate visit to the ancient sites less likely. Hence Shelley's novel mourns not only her circle, but their mode of engagement with the past. Different touristic possibilities arise where crowds are herded, and response is prescribed simultaneously to large groups. Yet the processes remain, as S. puts it, ‘fabrication’, with authentic and inauthentic objects alike necessary to create a personal ‘sense of antiquity’ (p. 209).