This unpretentious work by a non-scholar provides a real contribution to scholarship. In fact it could perhaps not have been accomplished by a scholar harnessed to the plough of academe and expected to publish punctually and prolifically. This work is a labour of love, pursued over many decades with resourcefulness and persistence. Its origins, related with a charm free of nostalgia, lie in the fortuitous location of a country retreat during a diplomatic posting in Athens. Thus we are in the realm of wonderful contributions pursued around diplomatic service: Alan Davidson's Mediterranean Seafood (1972), spawned during a stint in Tunisia and then pursued around the internal sea; or the American Foreign Service officer, William Eagleton's Introduction to Kurdish Rugs and Other Weavings (1988).

The book's organization is straightforward. An introductory chapter provides a history of cipollino and the work on it, particularly on the quarries. It also gives the intellectual underpinnings of the Roman marble trade. The author came to know southern Euboea well, starting with the quarries at Ano Aetos under Mt Ochi, where the family first rented, then owned a country house. She and her daughter published a full description of the Aetos quarries in 2002 in a journal for cultural resource management, which is probably no better known to other Romanists than to me (J. and A. Sutherland, Journal of Cultural Heritage 3 (2002), 251–9). It is usefully recapped here. The literature on cipollino itself is right up to date, geology drawn wisely from the work of L. Lazzarini, and the transport section usefully cites Peacock's work on quarry transport and open desert routes in Egypt. The overview of the Roman marble trade, however, leans on Ward-Perkins, and does not reflect any whiff of revisionism about standard column lengths or the enormous stockpile at Rome.

The balance of the book (chs 2–7) is a catalogue of instances of cipollino use arranged geographically by modern country. The descriptions are admirably detailed and backed by extensive photographs. Most, especially those taken by the author, are of excellent quality (and the colour values are well rendered in print). The accompanying compact disc provides digital versions of every illustration in the text, about half of which are in colour, but nearly all on the disc are. While this is certainly helpful, it is notable that the CD photo files are still quite small (few larger than 5 megabytes), and so there is little gain in resolution. The disc is titled ‘My Disc’, as if no one got around to changing a default to something more specific.

While ancient pieces in their own settings or in reuse, where churches (and mosques) bulk large, are covered in the first chapters, Part II is devoted to ‘use of the marble, in the later, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries’. This includes new construction in those centuries and, somewhat oddly, both museum collections and museum embellishments in cipollino. The scope here also seems narrower, as the Corsi samples tables in the London Natural History Museum are given their own billing, with only a passing reference to the better known (and better displayed) Corsi collection in the Oxford Museum of Natural History.

It should not be taken as unkind to note that the spirit of this collection is antiquarian in a very nineteenth-century way. There never was any real doubt that cipollino is the most widely distributed of the ‘imperial’ marbles (although the aptness of this term is the subject of renewed discussion recently). Today that must be taken as established, though it is unlikely that anyone will be able to devote the attention to another marble to provide a comparison. But there is a certain sense of ultimate frustration of the goal, as inferred here, of canvassing every instance of a something, whatever it be. For instance, while the author has strived mightily at Pompeii and Herculaneum (for example, gaining access to the marble rooms on the floor below the large opus sectile room in the House of the Relief of Telephus) and includes several of the streetside bars, we are left with no better sense of how cipollino interacted with other marbles — more and less humble — in those contexts.