This volume arises from a conference held in 2018 that looked back some 30 years to a previous colloquium of 1985 that was published as the volume L’Urbs, espace urbain et histoire. I ^er siècle av. J.-C.–III ^e ap. J.-C. (1987). The latter was a volume of around 850 pages that connected space and history together and was innovative for its time: L’Urbs was and continues to be a volume to return to. The volume under review is about half the size of L’Urbs.

There are three main sections: the first on sources and methods, the second on places and contexts, and the third on new approaches. There is also a preamble of two chapters looking back to the first conference as well as an introduction by the editors on ‘Les leçons d’Urbs et de Ferdinando Castagnoli’. In what follows, there is not space to cover every contribution to the book.

The first part on sources and methods opens with Palombi’s chapter on literary sources and urban history; it is followed by a chapter on epigraphy by G.L. Gregori and S. Orlandi. In both chapters issues are raised and discussed, but there is a feel in these chapters that the methods have not moved on from those of 1987 – in spite of the digital revolution that has made these texts more accessible and facilitated new readings of them. There follows a chapter focusing on the archaeology and the excavation of monuments (by A. D’Alessio) with a full review of the position of the Via Sacra and the temple of Jupiter Stator; on the latter, Figure 6 shows nine possible locations and comes to no certain conclusion, even with the benefit of excavation. Maybe we need to accept that there are riddles of Roman topography that cannot be solved – the Temple of Jupiter Stator being a prime example. F. de Caprariis’s ‘Vrbs e pianta marmorea, trenta anni dopo’ sets out how this unique source brings both expectation and disappointment with reference, firstly, to the Saepta and, secondly, to the shape and form of the Marble Plan in terms of what is excluded (notably the Castra Praetoria and the Baths of Caracalla) and included (the Janiculum through the necessity of composition [?]). A key change over the last 30 years has been the constant recreation of Rome’s monuments through digital reconstruction. P. Fleury and S. Madeleine report on their work based at the University of Caen, rather than offering a wider review of the development of the field of virtual reconstruction.

Part 2, ‘Lieux et contextes’, has a stronger focus on archaeology. It opens with a chapter by N. Purcell on ‘Connected spaces. The Forum’s orientation to the Capitoline’ with a view to joining together the spaces of the Forum Romanum and the Area Capitolina in the context of the fourth century bce – ‘as a new kind of stage on which a narrative of the distant past was performed’. The next chapter by J. Pflug moves onto the imperial palaces of the Palatine drawing on the explosion of publications since 1987 (Fig. 4). It is worth noting how there has been both a digital revolution and a new intensity of publication since the late 1980s – the world today is simply not the same as 30–40 years ago at the time of the publication of L’ Urbs. The chapter utilises recent reconstructions of the Palatine palaces and is a sharp contrast to Purcell’s chapter on the Forum and Capitoline, which does not include a plan. Moving forward, there is a chapter on the archaeology of the Aventine (P. Quaranta and A. Capodiferro), followed by a chapter on the Arch of Janus in the Campus Martius (A. Ten).

The standout chapter in this section is ‘Rome et ses collines entre topographie et histoire urbaine’ by C. Chillet, drawing on 30 years of research on the hills of Rome. The role of hills in the formation of urbanism in Rome is fundamental and maybe obvious, but so often obscured by a focus on monuments over the explanation of urbanism; Chillet sees the hills of Rome as spaces of funerals, economic production, habitation and circulation. The intersection of these four features creates possibilities for comprehending the distinctiveness of the urban periphery compared to the urban centre as delineated by Purcell and Pflug. Circulation as an analytical tool may also reveal the intersection between places, and circulation can be seen as an aspect of the context of any place within the city of Rome. The next chapter, by A. De Santis, leaps back to the ninth and eighth centuries bce with an examination of the role of archaeology in the reconstruction of history in that period, before another chronological leap in L. Spera’s chapter into the topography of ‘Roma Christiana dopo Krautheimer’, which is followed more reassuringly by R. Santangeli Valenzani’s chapter on late antique Rome ‘thirty years later’. Readers may conclude that this may not be a book to be read from front to back, but, perhaps, 30 years on from L’Urbs: espace urbain et d’histoire, books are no longer intended to be read in this way.

Part 3 leads us into ‘Nouvelles approches’, and this is where we can begin to see how the study of urban space has moved on since the publication of L’Urbs in 1987. A. Bertrand and S. Estienne explore the sanctuaries and the religious landscape of Rome that they link back to the paper by J. Scheid in L’Urbs. There is a focus on processions; the authors map the route of the procession that opened the Ludi Saeculares. However, there is much more than this; a wealth of information is included with numerous sanctuaries mentioned, including the recently excavated fountain of the nymphs adjacent to the shrine of Anna Perenna (in Piazza Euclide) and the role of Tiber Island as a religious locale. The oral communication of politics is the focus of the chapter by C. Rosillo-López and F. Pina Polo, taking readers from the rostra (plural) in the Forum Romanum into the vici and at the compita, with the addition of the inclusion of barbers and shops as places of communication. The next paper by E. Rosso explores the role of epigraphy in the reinforcement of imperial power and the evaluation of urban space as lieu de memoire. C. Bruun follows this with an evaluation of the provisioning of Rome, both in terms of water supply and provisions transported via the Tiber, which reads as a review of some of the literature from the last 30 years. The focus then shifts to law in C. Davoine’s chapter, which he juxtaposes against the spatial dimension of the city of Rome, encompassing the legal control of mobilities. Importantly, he sees law not as a set of rules but as a discourse that encapsulates a particular concept of urban space in antiquity.

L’Urbs in 1987 omitted houses from its remit, which Courrier and Guilhembet present a chapter on in the volume under review that sees living in Rome as a form of habitus with a view to countering the dystopian image of life in Rome (e.g. A. Scobie, Klio 68 [1986], 399–433). The authors review the literature and reveal how the field has shifted, including the appearance of the sensory turn. Following on from this evaluation, N. Tran sets out to establish the visibility of work and workers in Rome as an aspect of urbanism and a striking sensory experience for visitors to Rome. A. Vincent follows with a review of the sensory turn alongside the temporality of the senses across a Roman day. Observations, such as places have senses and senses make places within the urban sensorium, draw on a range of literature from the decade leading up to the 2018 conference. Finally, P. Gros, in the concluding remarks, comments both on the papers and on the diversity of approaches to urban history that have developed over the last 30 years.

Looking across the volume, there is a mixture of new work, new reconstructions and new approaches that are quite unlike the content of the 1987 volume. Yet there is a sense that maybe less has changed, partly due to a desire to anchor the volume under review back in time to 30 years earlier. Another major change is the inclusion of a greater proportion of female scholars in the volume under review. Many papers in the volume could have been expanded to book-length studies and probably will be at some point. This points to a degree of vibrancy around the study of the city of Rome. We should also note the shift in title from L’Urbs, espace urbain et histoire in 1987 to Rome, archéologie et histoire urbaine in 2022, which is reflected in the loss of espace across the chapters. Maybe due to the selection of authors, the theoretical dimension of space is underplayed – but that is reflected in the title; this is a book about archaeology and urban history that is linked back to the 1987 volume. There is another strand of the study of space derived from L’Urbs, espace urbain et histoire that draws on Anglo-American geographers such as D. Harvey and E. Soja, writing in the 1980s and 1990s, but whose work links back to H. Lefebvre and, in particular, his book La production d’espace (see Antichthon 59 [2025], 1–20 for the most recent appraisal of this tradition).

The book is available online at no cost as well as in print format. This raises a question for us in 2026: we hold conferences or colloquia or workshops that are gatherings of academics to share ideas and to meet and discuss topics. These do or do not end up in printed volumes in the manner of the conference held in 1985 and then disseminated in print to a wider audience. L’Urbs in 1987 had an impact because the print version was the only means to gain access to the knowledge shared at a conference. Yet, in an internet-connected world, what is the best way to disseminate a set of interesting, if slightly disparate, papers from a conference? Is print and the electronic version of print the best way? The presence of 3D-reconstructions across this volume printed as 2D-objects shows the limitation of capturing modern archaeological discourse at conferences in print. Figure 8 (p. 215) would have been a vibrant rotating image at the conference – its 2D static representation is difficult to read. In this particular instance the conversion from digital to print simply does not or cannot work. This is food for thought for institutions that hold conferences and follow them up with publications of the papers.