This handsome volume of over 400 pages, the text printed in two columns, offers a very detailed review and analysis of elite houses excavated in Cyrene and Ptolemais, with the aim of setting these remarkable buildings within a local, regional and imperial context. Overall, the author succeeds in her aim, providing at the close of the book a series of synthetic chapters. The last of these (Capitolo V) offers a very helpful perspective on the owners of the houses in the context of the social and economic history of Roman Cyrenaica, before a concluding chapter draws together the observations made in a detailed consideration of the surviving evidence. A generous English summary is provided, with an excellent bibliography and an index in which the references to houses discussed in detail in the first part of the book appear in bold font. There are remarkably few typographical and linguistic errors, although in a few instances the Italian text is run together to fit the columnar format, which makes it hard to follow for the non-Italian reader. Available on Open Access, this book is surely destined to become a fundamental work of reference, despite some problems with its organisation set out below.

There can be no doubt that Gasparini is in full command of the published and archived evidence of recent and twentieth-century excavations, and she has detailed personal knowledge of these sites, on which she has already published significant studies. Reports made by pre-twentieth century travellers, the subject of much recent enquiry, are not included. A great strength of the book is the range and quality of the bibliography. The author’s presentation of little-known archival sources, notably in the UK, where she was supported by a grant from BILNAS (formerly the Society for Libyan Studies), and Italy, is also welcome and is often helpful: for example, in the account of the discovery of the building later identified as the House of Hesychius in 1934 (34). This book is the fruit of twenty years of research, which have seen significant recent excavations of houses in Ptolemais by a team from the University of Warsaw – a well-published project that has greatly improved our understanding, notably of late antique houses in the city. Italian teams have also been active in Cyrene, again offering considerable advances in our understanding of the city, notably in later antiquity, and of its surrounding territory. Finally, the digital publication of Joyce Reynolds’ great work, IRCyr2020 – Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica 2020 (https://ircyr2020.inslib.kcl.ac.uk/en/), has made the wealth of epigraphic evidence widely accessible. The timing of this volume is then opportune.

Though there can be no doubt of the book’s enduring value as a repository of knowledge and interpretation of the evidence of lives lived in largely elite housing in two cities of Roman Cyrenaica, there are some questions concerning its scope and structure. It is puzzling that the well-excavated site of Berenike (Sidi Khrebish, Benghazi) is omitted, though the publications are frequently referenced in the footnotes. Rural houses and ports such as Apollonia are also referenced, but due to conflict in Libya in the years following 2011 the focus remains limited to Cyrene and Ptolemais. Indeed, the two cities were selected because of their roles as provincial capitals at different times, the project forming Gasparini’s contribution to the research programme ‘Ptolemaica. Cirene e il Mediterraneo Orientale’, directed by Prof. Serenella Ensoli of the Università degli Studi della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’. The aim was to set the Cyrenaican houses in a wider geographical context (including ancient Palestine and Cyprus) and bring to a wider audience the fruits of the recent excavations and studies alongside the results of earlier excavations, some not previously published. Ensoli has contributed a preface giving the book an academic context. Turning to the acknowledgements at the end of the volume, Gasparini’s range of academic contacts, notably in Italy, Poland and Britain, is exceptional, and informs the entire text. However, the eastern Mediterranean focus has its disadvantages. Gasparini often cites cultural, economic and political links with Rome and southern Italy, but perhaps some consideration of Cherchel/Iol Caesarea (Algeria), the capital of the Mauretanian king Juba II and his queen Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra VII of Egypt, would have revealed further similarities of urban planning and furnishing of a capital city within a late Ptolemaic/early Roman imperial cultural framework, as well as late antique housing of considerable interest.

In Gasparini’s account of Cyrene and Ptolemais we see the enormous logistical and personal difficulties encountered by non-Libyan scholars in maintaining excavations in Cyrenaica, despite the profound engagement and support of Libyan colleagues. All too often excavation and study have been interrupted by conflict, global and local. As a result of these and other problems, historic excavation records are often patchy, and much significant material was left unrecovered or unanalysed, particularly striking in the account of wall paintings (336). These lacunae have created opportunities for the emergence of varying interpretations of the date and function of elite houses, vigorously pursued by key scholars personally invested in Cyrenaican archaeology, such as Sandro Stucchi, Carl Hermann Kraeling, Richard Goodchild, John Ward-Perkins and more recently Filippo Venturini. The many competing views are assiduously recorded here, the author usually offering, often as a modest aside in a footnote, her own sensible resolution of the questions. I would have welcomed a louder voice for Gasparini at the expense of the rehearsing of some of the earlier debates.

Cyrene and Ptolemais are first described as cities, with the aim of providing a context for the houses to be described in detail. Here we encounter a problem with inconsistency. Cyrene is treated as an urban entity, individual houses being located within the city’s zones of major development, public and private: the Acropolis, the Agora, the Sanctuary of Apollo and the Central Area. In contrast, the houses of the less-explored city of Ptolemais are listed individually. Indeed, identification of individual structures on the city plan (150: Fig. 164) is restricted to the houses under discussion. To follow Gasparini’s text describing the city, I needed to consult the plan provided in Philip Kenrick’s guide to Cyrenaica (Kenrick Reference Kenrick2013, 66–67, Figs41–42), itself much referenced in her text. Kenrick notes the unusually generous size of the insula housing the Casa della Triconchos, not given in the account on pp. 205–8. Reading overly reduced plans is also a difficulty, for example in Fig. 256 on p. 256, where Enrico Gallocchio has evidently redrawn eleven house plans from both cities to scale, but the scale is too small to read. There is also a lack of articulation between plans, for example the maps of the eastern Mediterranean and of Cyrenaica (4: Fig. 1) and the plan of Cyrene redrawn by the author from Stucchi (Reference Stucchi1975), with a helpful inset of the quarters of the city in which the houses are set (6: Fig. 2). It would have been useful to have had all the plans in the first part of the book, whether of cities or individual houses, redrawn to scale and articulated in a consistent pattern. It would have been helpful, too, to provide plans referencing major historical events of considerable architectural and topographical impact, such as the Jewish Revolt of the early second century AD and the foundation of Claudiopolis within the city of Cyrene in the 260s. Most of the site photographs, whether archival or more recent, are unscaled.

Gasparini’s personal research interest lies in the interior decoration of houses, where she rightly insists on the integration of painted and panelled surfaces with the architecture of the building. Here the very detailed descriptions are enhanced by high-quality, coloured scaled drawings by Enrico Gallocchio, and by detailed colour photographs of the decorative elements. Some questions leap out from the pages: I was struck by the table recording the use of individual marbles in the floor of the summer triclinium in the House of Jason Magnus at Cyrene (319: Fig. 302), of interest for the unexpected dominance of ‘greco scritto’ – a fact unremarked in the text beyond a note of its wide availability. This stone has recently been recognised as deriving from multiple sources within the Mediterranean basin, including Ephesus, Turkey, as well as the more conventionally accepted Cap d’Annaba, Algeria (Perna et al. Reference Perna, Antonelli and Lazzarini2023). Only Building W at Berenice appears as a second instance of its use in Cyrenaica, in the preceding table (318: Fig. 301). Given the location of Cyrenaica, Ephesus is the more likely source, though the Proconnesian quarries, so dominant in the architectural marbles, are not to be excluded.

Though we learn much new detail of the purpose and later repurposing of many of the residences considered here, the identity of the residents and the roles of the houses often remain frustratingly beyond the grasp even of Gasparini: only the houses of Jason Magnus and Hesychius, already well known in the city, may be identified at Cyrene, while the House of Leukaktios (not accepted here as a Hellenised version of the Latin name Lucius Actius, as suggested by Kenrick Reference Kenrick2013, 85) is to be added from significant recent excavations at Ptolemais. Though the dating sequence is clarified, the owner and the function of the Palazzo delle Colonne in Ptolemais remain elusive, and the governor’s residence remains unidentified.

There is much to be learned from this work, even though one might wish for the first part to have been reformatted and re-edited to make the detail more accessible. As it is, I suggest that the reader begins with the excellent Capitolo V, using the index to dive into the houses of especial interest. Despite these reservations, Gasparini is to be congratulated for drawing together with great energy and rigour a wealth of information from multiple excavations of varied quality.