Roma Roma non est (‘Rome is not Rome’), as Erasmus concisely put it (Ciceronianus; de Beer, p. 52). Perhaps no other city has evoked so powerful a sense of the then and the now, the divide between past and present and the layering of the remnants of that past within the structures and cityscapes of the present. At times, this co-presence of then and now appears as a continuity, and at times – as in Erasmus’ memorable formulation – as a disjunction. In the eighth century ce the city’s population, which had reached one million under the Early Empire, may have plummeted as low as 10,000 (Mayer, p. 23). The rubble-strewn city encountered by Italian humanists more closely resembled the pre-foundation cow-pastures of Evander’s Pallanteum (Virg. Aen. 8.337–69) than the elegant, monument-dense aurea Roma of the classical period. Yet the memory of Rome’s past greatness persisted through the survival of Latin texts. For this reason, competitive claims to that memory, and for the title of heir to Rome’s imperium both in arms and in letters, were frequently made and fiercely contested. The two books considered in this review approach the eternal city’s glorious reputation and dramatic ruination from related yet distinct perspectives: one explores the discursive battle for the mantle of Roman power in Renaissance Europe; the other traces the reception, representation, exploitation and conservation of the city’s material remnants from antiquity to modernity.

In The Renaissance Battle for Rome: Competing Claims to an Idealized Past in Humanist Latin Poetry de Beer examines ‘Renaissance culture as a constant negotiation between appropriating and contesting the idea and ideal of “Rome”’ (p. 2). In this negotiation the main players are those whom de Beer categorises as ‘insiders’ – humanists based in Rome and allied with the papacy – and ‘outsiders’ – humanists based in other places, who denigrate the material and moral conditions of the present-day city to promote their own city, nation or imperial power as the true heir to classical Rome (pp. 7–9). As de Beer notes, the breakdown of insider and outsider strategies is not always neat or wholly consistent. But the overall heuristic power of the interpretative framework is evident from her analysis of concrete instances throughout the book. Renaissance humanist poets emerge as ‘spin doctors’ (p. 17), plying their trade not in televised sound bites but in the early modern prestige-medium of classicising Latin verse.

The centring of humanist Latin poetry is a welcome choice. C. Celenza has eloquently argued for the value of recovering the ‘lost Italian Renaissance’ of humanist Latin texts, but in practice most scholars heeding this call have focused on prose texts and intellectual history (C. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy [2004]). In the classical tradition poetry has a distinctive capacity to evoke and describe places. The intertextual density of this tradition provided Renaissance humanists with a coded repertoire of analogical links with which to enrich their representations of Rome (p. 19). De Beer’s adept unpacking of these intertextual codes provides a fresh hermeneutic perspective on the humanists’ diverse ‘spin’ tactics as they praise their home territories and burnish their own reputations.

In making these arguments de Beer draws on ‘heritage studies’ (p. 25) and ‘the field of imageology, which studies the (usually stereotypical) characterizations of groups or nations and how they are shaped and activated’ (p. 11). I have no substantive disagreement with these methodologies. Nevertheless, they do not seem to offer specific conceptual tools beyond certain common-sense guidelines. For example, the observation that the images of Rome in Renaissance humanist poetry ‘are not objective renderings of the city or empire of Rome’, but ‘rather represent mental pictures’ (p. 11) seems unobjectionable, but it is unclear why imageology is needed to articulate this insight.

De Beer divides her discussion of competing representations of Rome into four categories corresponding to key arenas in the Renaissance struggle for cultural and political pre-eminence: ‘power, morality, cityscape, and literature’ (p. 21). In each case images and counter-images do battle, representing Rome as, respectively, a ‘City of Empire’ and a ‘City of Lost Empire’, a ‘City of Virtue’ and a ‘City of Vice’, a ‘City of Magnificence’ and a ‘City of Ruins’, and, finally, ‘A City of Latin literature or learning’ in which humanists vie for the status of ‘new Romans’ (p. 13). Chapters corresponding to these four domains of imagery are preceded by an opening chapter on Renaissance paradigms of societal rebirth.

Petrarch’s concept of the restoration of the city’s ancient past was especially consequential for later humanist framings. De Beer juxtaposes Petrarch’s appeal for Rome’s renewal and his ‘circular template of history’ (p. 35) with the Contra Franciscum Petrarcham epistola by the fourteenth-century French writer Jean d’Hesdin (pp. 25–9). Whereas Petrarch laments Rome’s decline in support of his call for the return of the papacy to Rome, d’Hesdin argues that the papacy should remain in Avignon, insisting that Rome is merely an empty ‘signifier’ (p. 28). Petrarch, in his Contra eum qui maledixit Italie, counters that Rome is ‘still something besides a name’ (adhuc tamen est aliquid preter nomen, trans. de Beer, p. 29). De Beer’s example convincingly shows how the same set of facts – Rome’s current ruinous state, the city’s famous ‘name’ – can be rhetorically inflected to radically different ends. It is worth asking, however, how circular Petrarch’s concept of history really was. Throughout his oeuvre he calls for a return to the heights of antiquity’s Parnassus, yet as he does so, he often points to the seemingly unbridgeable abyss between past and present. Petrarch’s despairing sense of being cut off from antiquity at the very least problematises the notion of a ‘circular’ return to the past.

Not everyone shared Petrarch’s labyrinthine poetics of aporia (cf. T. Barolini, ‘The Self in the Labyrinth of Time (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta)’, in: V. Kirkham and A. Maggi [edd.], Petrarch: The Critical Guide to the Complete Works [2009]). Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanist poets wrote fulsome encomia of a renewed aurea aetas, lauding the rulers and asserting the patriotic interests of their respective city-states. In his elegiac collection Xandra the pro-Medici humanist Cristoforo Landino proclaims a new Florentine Golden Age modelled on Augustan Rome. When Landino travels to Rome and conveniently finds it in a state of lamentable ruin (Xandra 2.30; de Beer, pp. 132–3), he implicitly juxtaposes it with his own ‘flourishing’ Florentia filled with splendid Medici monuments (Xandra 2.29; de Beer, pp. 154–5). For Landino and a series of other outsiders from the German humanist Conrad Celtis to the French poet Joachim du Bellay history is not circular but linear: power and cultural prestige are transmitted not by privileged bloodlines or ‘continuity of location’ (p. 7), but by translatio imperii (‘transfer of empire’, pp. 64–5, 143–4 and passim). From this perspective Rome’s ruined state vividly demonstrates that imperium has travelled to a new location. Conversely, for humanists closely aligned with the papacy, such as Aurelio Lippo Brandolini, the fact of the city’s ruination serves to frame poetic praises of the innumerable ways in which a given pope has restored the city and carried out new building projects (pp. 195–6).

At times such focus on insider and outsider strategies, images and counter-images, risks seeming overly schematic, reducing the fascinating world of Renaissance cities and their learned cultures to a series of moves on a rhetorical chess board. Latin humanist poetry, which, in the hands of poets such as Pontano, Poliziano or Sadoleto, can be powerful, surprising, playful, moving and strange, receives scant vindication from the more threadbare samples examined in the present book. On the other hand, de Beer’s selections are necessarily guided by the book’s core themes, and even dull poetry (I am not thinking of du Bellay’s, but certainly of Brandolini’s) helps illuminate cultural and intellectual history. De Beer, moreover, has done a considerable service in transcribing and translating this poetry, much of which has not been published in modern editions. Overall, The Renaissance Battle for Rome exhibits the author’s extensive knowledge both of humanist writings and of the classical texts that those writings exploit and adapt. De Beer’s conceptual framework of insider and outsider tactics in the battle for prestige and supremacy, and her skilled elucidation of how humanist ‘spin doctors’ manipulated the codes of Latin poetry to support their arguments, contribute a valuable new critical approach to the study of Renaissance humanism.

Martial, in De Spectaculis, declares that the wonders of the ancient world pale in comparison with the recently built Colosseum: unum pro cunctis Fama loquetur opus (‘Fame shall speak of one work in place of all’, Spect. 1.8). This premier wonder of the world would later become its premier ruin, as Mayer’s The Ruins of Rome: A Cultural History traces in rich detail. Both de Beer’s and Mayer’s books stress the critical role of the survival of Roman literature. Latin texts such as Martial’s De Spectaculis kept alive the memory of Rome’s imperial grandeur, both for those who sought to inherit the mantle of its power and for those who studied, restored, documented and visited its ruins. In some instances, of course, the two categories overlapped: control of (the image of) Rome’s ruins constituted a form of control over the city’s legacy.

R. Macauley’s Pleasure of Ruins (1953) supplies the orienting term of Mayer’s book: ‘ruin-mindedness’ (Mayer, p. 12). In Mayer’s usage it refers to an appreciation of the value of ruins in and of themselves, typically for their aesthetic qualities. The task Mayer sets himself is to trace the emergence of such ruin-mindedness throughout history and to explain why Roman ruins in particular have both attracted such extraordinary attention and attained an emblematic status. He begins by examining the concept of ruins in antiquity, arguing that, for the ancient Greeks and Romans, ruined structures were simply ‘desolate’, lacking any picturesque appeal (pp. 5–6). While there might be room to dispute this statement at the edges, in broad terms it holds true. ‘The reason’, Mayer states, is that ‘ruins were felt to be a defect of material culture’ and ‘had no place within still occupied cities and towns’ (p. 6). Less convincing is the claim that the ruins of still occupied modern communities similarly fail to attract aesthetic interest: ‘Detroit, Michigan, presumably takes no pride in its current degradation’ (p. 6). Yet the aestheticization of Detroit’s ruins, including through ‘ruin tours’, is a well-known phenomenon. (cf. the headline: ‘Dying Shopping Malls Are the Roman Ruins of our Civilization: Big-box stores are beautiful once they have nothing to sell’; Kelly Karivalis, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/magazine/dying-mall-beauty.html, The New York Times Magazine, 11 November 2025). The ruin-fetish, once unleashed, is contagious.

How, then, did ruin-mindedness arise, and why specifically in connection with Rome? Mayer cites S. Settis’s claim that ruin-awareness emerged because of the sense of radical rupture with the past created by the fall of the Roman empire (p. 9). Moreover, the continuing use of the Latin language and the survival of Latin texts kept alive the ‘memory of Rome’, endowing its ruins with particular significance (p. 13). Following these opening reflections, the book embarks on a detailed exploration of the history of Roman ruins: the story of ‘How Rome Became Ruinous’ (Chapter 2); Medieval and Renaissance responses to the ruins (Chapters 3 and 4); the ‘battle’ among various parties to imitate, preserve and exploit ruined structures (Chapter 5); the representation of ruins in topographical treatises and guidebooks (Chapter 6), in visual media such as paintings, engraved vedute, drawings and photography (Chapter 7), and in virtual reconstructions such as models, CGI, cinema and television (Chapter 8); ruin-souvenirs of the Grand Tour (Chapter 9); ruins in landscape gardens (Chapter 10); conservation and restoration practices as they evolved over time (Chapter 11); and ‘Literary Responses to the Ruins’ (Chapter 12).

Within this vast range of topics, media and time periods, some overarching themes are recurrent. One is the emergence of ‘ruin-mindedness’. The first hint of this, in Mayer’s account, appears in Hildebert of Lavardin’s eleventh-century poem addressed to Rome, which concedes that the city is ‘almost a complete ruin’ (prope tota ruina, trans. Mayer, p. 41), while insisting that the city’s decus could not be completely obliterated (p. 42). The true watershed, as in de Beer’s study of the ‘the battle for Rome’, comes with Petrarch, who claims to have been ‘overwhelmed by a vast amazement’ (stuporis mole obrutus, trans. Mayer, p. 64) on first seeing Rome’s ruinsFootnote ¹ and who interpreted them through the lens of his considerable reading in classical literature – still not an aesthetic response to ruins, but a significant one for subsequent humanist receptions (pp. 55–60). In the following century Manuel Chrysoloras ‘sounded a new note in his expressly aesthetic response to the ruination of ancient Rome’ (p. 64). This process would reach the culmination of ‘peak ruin-mindedness’ by the mid-eighteenth century, when a ruin could be ‘deemed an aesthetic improvement on an undamaged original’ (p. 115).

Even as ruins came into their own as objects of aesthetic and touristic appreciation, scholars’ knowledge of them and the methods of studying them changed dramatically over the centuries. The erroneous identification of the ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius as the Temple of Peace, for example, persisted until the nineteenth century (p. 116). At the same time, as Mayer shows, early commentators on Roman ruins such as Master Gregory and Petrarch did not merely repeat commonplace errors, but studied ruins in a critical spirit, attempting to identify visible remains with structures mentioned in classical texts (pp. 52, 58–60). Mayer’s positive reassessment of these early efforts is a welcome one. In our comfortable quasi-omniscience, bolstered by the advances of modern archaeology, we underestimate the tremendous challenges faced, and occasionally overcome, by early students of Roman ruins. Accompanying these shifts in the aesthetic appreciation and knowledge of Rome’s ruins were changing practices of conservation, restoration and presentation. As tourism began to confer an economic value on ruins (pp. 275–6), and scientific archaeology made them objects of increasingly rigorous study, it became imperative to sequester them behind fences (p. 250) and defend them from the intrusions of plant life. Ironically, as Mayer notes, the removal of vegetation made the ruins look less ‘picturesque’ in the eyes of many visitors (pp. 253, 262–3). Almost as a compensatory impulse, landscape gardens began to incorporate artificial ruins with an appropriately dilapidated appearance (pp. 212–40).

Despite these and other thematic leitmotifs that provide discursive continuity, long sections of the book consist in the enumeration of topographers, guidebook authors, artists, photographers, makers of models and plans, and so forth. It can be difficult for readers to process all these details. At times one is uncertain whether the book is meant to be read continuously or consulted as a guidebook – and what kind of reader is envisioned, specialist or general. Specialists will look in vain for the full, original-language texts of longer passages cited in translation, although key Latin or Italian phrases are included in parentheses and source texts are identified in the endnotes. At the same time, Mayer often discusses named scholars’ arguments in the main text – a practice that seems more suited to the specialist than the general reader.

Ruins stand at the intersection of conceptions of time, fragmentation, decay, the aesthetic, sublimity and the self. There is a lot to unpack in the concept as it evolves over time. Yet Mayer devotes little sustained conceptual attention to ruins and ruination. One gets the impression that Macauley’s term ‘ruin-mindedness’ is meant to stand in for a more searching theorisation of ruins otherwise missing from the book. The subtitle ‘a cultural history’ is perhaps instructive in this regard. While intellectual history is not a major focus, the mini-sketches of cultural history interspersed throughout are often illuminating: for example, the role of the motorcar in both Marinetti’s anti-ruin futurism and Mussolini’s ‘“Liberation” of the Ruins’ (pp. 267–70); or how the excavation, restoration and conservation of Roman ruins under the Napoleonic occupation of the city informed and echoed the contemporary Rome-ification of Paris (pp. 247–52).

The book is as lavishly illustrated as it is dense with erudition. Readers are regaled with a banquet of curiosities, from a wooden model of the Colosseum that took 22 years to make (p. 202) to a particular form of ivy that grew in the Colosseum, known in French as ruine-de-Rome (p. 264). Mayer’s lucid, impeccable English prose offers its own pleasingly old-fashioned rewards: ‘the howling wilderness of eighteenth-century Connecticut’ (p. 191); ‘The waspish Walpole arguably missed the point’ (p. 217). While it does not substantially engage with theoretical aspects of the topic, The Ruins of Rome will be a standard reference work for readers interested in the history of the city’s ruination and its subsequent canonisation as ruin capital of the world.

Both books discussed in this review explore how unique aspects of a particular place are studied, represented, reproduced and disseminated well beyond the bounds of that place, as they become adaptable signifiers exploited in broader projects and contestations. The sites and buildings of ancient Rome, as Mayer documents, were rendered virtual and circulated in the form of illustrated guidebooks and touristic souvenirs. In the literary sphere thinkers such as Lorenzo Valla sought to replace Rome’s territorial imperium with a free-floating imperium of the Latin language, absorbing the distinctive aura of Roman place into the replicability of language and text (cf. de Beer, pp. 182–7). As we contemplate the ruins and memories of ancient Rome from the vantage point of our world of endlessly replicated digital simulacra, we are in a unique position to reflect on what has been gained and what has been lost.