D. has produced an indispensable and highly accessible synthesis of the urban history of late antique and medieval Rome, as revealed by its standing buildings and material culture. The book makes clear not only its heavy debt to R. Krautheimer's 1980 masterpiece, Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1318, but also its ambition to replace it (p. 8). Krautheimer's pioneering book studied Rome's church architecture as a record of urban and political as well as artistic change. At its centre is a story of how the papacy inherited and transformed ancient Rome's cityscape. It was also written, as D. underlines, before a revolution in Rome's post-classical archaeology, a field that had barely existed before. Excavations from the 1980s, such as at the Crypta Balbi, and improved techniques for dating construction have transformed our understanding of society and settlement in the early Middle Ages. Forty years on there is now an enormous volume of material data, about much more than just church building, and a large, sophisticated literature, both of which have overturned several assumptions popularised by Krautheimer and opened new fields of enquiry. A critical digest of this work, covering the longue durée, has therefore been a desideratum for some time. D.'s survey fulfils this need, and it will engage the scholars, students and wider readers it sets out to address.
D.'s narrative begins around 400 ce, on the reasonable basis that the structural crises of that century present a more significant rupture with Rome's antiquity than do the 313 Edict of Milan and Constantine's building programme, which open Krautheimer's history. This also avoids overlap with Krautheimer's fuller descriptions of Constantine's basilicas; throughout, the book strives to complement rather than duplicate the earlier work's close accounts of ecclesiastical architecture. The first chapter surveys the monuments and topography of the fourth-century city. This sets up one of the questions that animate the book: how Romans responded to, transformed and were constrained by the vast inheritance of the ancient capital's built environment. The problem is immediately posed by the effects of war and, especially, the end of fiscal imports of African grain to the city in the mid-fifth century. An urban population that stood at perhaps c. 750,000 in the fourth century crashed to maybe c. 50,000–60,000 by the 530s. The marks of depopulation on the cityscape, from abandoned residential quarters to declining dedicatory inscriptions, are clear. But it is equally evident that imperial and, from 493, Gothic authorities continued to intervene to maintain infrastructure and ceremonial space, even if (as Cassiodorus’ letters show) a reduced population forced careful decisions about what works to prioritise.
Previous generations, in part seduced by the papacy's own literary narratives, imagined that the popes became effective sovereigns of Rome after the crisis century. Scholars now recognise that following Justinian's reconquest of Italy, and into the seventh century, the city remained under Byzantine administration. D. shows effectively how architectural and topographic evidence substantiates this point. Civic, not church, authorities repaired urban infrastructure. Known construction projects within the walls, including churches, took place overwhelmingly on state property. The porticus maxima, connecting the government centre on the Palatine to the Ponte S. Angelo, is convincingly shown to have been developed as a space for civic ceremony and administration. It was only towards c. 700 that popes became effective, sovereign governors of the city. Again, the testimony of standing buildings witnesses the transition to what Thomas Noble called the ‘Republic of St. Peter’. D. persuasively identifies the office of John VII (705–7) as a turning point. John was able to order reconstruction projects on the Palatine and even appropriated the imperial habit of commissioning portraiture of himself. His eighth-century successors exercised their jurisdictional autonomy by assuming the maintenance of walls and aqueducts, building monumental churches, and even becoming the founders of new, walled microcities from the Vatican to Ostia. The papacy's political leadership and power to reshape the cityscape declined markedly from the mid-ninth century. Major papal building ceased, but recent archaeology means we can trace how elites beyond the curia intervened in the urban fabric. In a profound transformation of ancient spatial organisation, ceremonial areas such as the central fora were turned over to gardens and housing. This includes the well-preserved, aristocratic residences of recycled masonry in the Forum of Nerva.
The pivotal transition between the post-Roman and the later medieval city occurred in the century from c. 1050, when demographic and economic growth radically reconfigured the built environment. Settlement increasingly nucleated around the banks of the Tiber, ending the far more widely scattered patchwork of settlement that characterised the late antique city (a process Krautheimer assumed took place centuries earlier). Rising elites, operating in an increasingly factionalised political environment, raised the first fortified tower-houses. Meanwhile, the papacies of Paschal II (1099–1118) and his successors saw the church revive its capacity to alter the cityscape, as shown by bold new foundations and the forest of belltowers that rivalled their secular counterparts. D. rightly highlights the importance of F. Guidobaldi's article (MEFRM 126 [2014]), which recognised that these same popes reshaped the foundations of the city, elevating the ground-level to regulate the street network and support new construction projects. This marked a major shift compared to early medieval building, which typically renovated the existing remains of the ancient city. Papal sovereignty in the city was quickly challenged by secular elites’ establishment of the Senate in 1143, but the latter's (still visible) commitment to maintaining the Aurelian walls and other civic spaces also reflects continuity. An expanding economy still empowered institutions to regulate and reform the urban fabric with ambition.
Perhaps inevitably, D., an early medievalist, is less in his comfort zone in the more summary chapter on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which at times notably backtracks to consider developments in earlier periods. The focus is on the great baronial palace complexes that englobed ancient monuments, such as the Orsini at the Theatre of Pompey, and projected families’ close control over local neighbourhoods. Their splendour reflected the thirteenth-century highpoint of medieval Rome's economic and demographic expansion. By contrast, few ambitious urban projects emerged after 1300, when the city suffered economic downturn, the departure of the papal court, plague and revolt. Nevertheless, as D. concludes, when the Renaissance popes of the fifteenth century returned to renovate the city, ‘the Rome they inherited was mostly a creation of the Middle Ages’, not antiquity (p. 259).
This 1,000-year history is communicated with admirable clarity and concision. Skeletal political narratives remain at an essential minimum, ceding focus to the remarkable testimony of the city's material culture. In line with the broad audiences sought by the book, specialist fields, such as the history and interpretation of building techniques, are accessibly introduced. Here and elsewhere, readers will welcome the book's consistent and lavish illustration. Building plans, maps and a great number of well-chosen colour photos taken by D. help to elucidate complex changes. Arresting details illuminate the narrative throughout – from the tenth-century document that reveals that the Stadium of Domitian was still used as an athletic ground to the extraordinary thirteenth-century fresco of Mithras in the cardinal's palace hall at Santi Quattro Coronati. The book is at its strongest when decoding the built environment as a record of the shifting power of different authorities and institutions to reorder urban life. The papacy was only one of such actors. More could be said, without sacrificing concision, about the changing commercial and industrial topography of the city. The last chapter gives a late, brief overview, but it would be a service to draw together the scattered but suggestive archaeological data on the subject. This would help bring Rome alive as a city made by ordinary women (absent here) and men, not only its elite patrons. Some specialists will also wish for fuller referencing, despite caveats about limits to space. The book does not offer, or claim to offer, original interpretations. Its highly effective work of synthesis is located firmly in the traditional and self-referential field of Roman topography. Consequently, it does not engage with comparative or other thematic approaches to medieval urbanism. Nevertheless, all students and scholars of Rome and medieval cities are indebted to D. for producing an invaluable companion to the material life of the metropolis.
