This is the first English translation of Italo Insolera's classic history of ‘modern Rome’. Insolera, architect and urban planner (1929–2012), wrote the last, revised and enlarged edition of Roma moderna, on which this translation is based, with the collaboration of urban planner Paolo Berdini. The first edition dates back to 1962, at a time when a new urban plan for Rome was the subject of intense political debate. It was Antonio Cederna – a founding figure of the Italian movement for the preservation of historical and natural heritage, and a stark critic of the vigorous and ill-regulated post-war urban growth – who initially proposed that Insolera write it: and the influence of Cederna's views is apparent throughout the book.

Modern Rome covers 200 years of urban history: from the early nineteenth century, when Rome was a relatively small city that ‘from a spatial point of view as well as social…appeared the same as three centuries before’ (p. 13), to the early 2010s, when the ‘eternal city’ had grown into a vast, multifarious and rather problematic metropolis. Insolera (with Berdini) follows the main steps of this massive urban expansion: the destruction of the splendid aristocratic villas that crowned the city centre until the late nineteenth century; the construction of garden suburbs after World War I; the development of the suburban borgate (specifically Roman social housing complexes) that radically increased the residential separation between the lower and the middle to upper classes; the building boom of the 1950s to 1960s, when the urban population nearly doubled and the city sprawled out in every direction; and up to the construction of ‘new centrality zones’ and a huge amount of market housing on the outskirts in the 2000s, when the extraordinary demographic growth of the post-war era had long ended. The transformation of the historical centre is also charted, with the extensive demolitions carried out between the late nineteenth century and the Fascist period, and then the processes of tertiarization, gentrification and touristification that have profoundly altered its structure and function since the mid-twentieth century.

Insolera's account is centred on the physical transformation of the city and especially on planning issues. Urban plans are exposed and discussed in detail: from the first plan drafted two years after the proclamation of Rome as the capital of Italy in 1871, which never became law, to the latest general plan approved in 2008. Insolera highlights the flaws of most plans and points to the fact that their prescriptions were often altered or disregarded, so that they were rarely able to steer the actual evolution of the city. The predominance of land and building speculation that made a planned and balanced urban growth impossible is the thread running through the book.

The peculiarities of Rome's urban development and its exceptionality with regard to other European capitals, but also Italian large cities, are stressed. Among these peculiarities are: the fact that Rome never was a truly industrial city, which meant that ‘it could not count on the modern tools for integrating the various classes into an urban unity’ (p. 117); the lack of basic amenities, parks and public services in many newly built areas; the exceptional extent of unauthorized construction, which in the 1970s ‘was no longer one among Rome's facts of life; rather, it became the city's very way of being’ (p. 295); and the structural inadequacy of public transportation, to which post-war policies aimed at favouring private circulation gave a significant contribution.

The role of some key figures who, by virtue of their influence on the urban development of Rome, can be considered the city's most significant ‘planners’, is underlined. These include: the prefect and head of the Tiber Department during the ‘Napoleonic years’ 1809–1814, Camille de Tournon, who proposed to create a large archaeological park around the Forum and another park on the Pincian Hill; Pius IX's minister, monsignor de Mérode, who built the first railway track inside the city walls and started the development of the area between Termini station and the historical centre; and Virgilio Testa, head of various municipal bureaucracies from the 1920s to the 1960s, who led the transformation of the abandoned E42 universal exposition area into the EUR district, personifying the continuity of post-war urban development within the guidelines that had been set during Fascism.

On the whole, Insolera draws a rather grim picture of the urban development of Rome, seen as a long sequence of mistakes, failures and missed opportunities, with just a few interludes of virtuous administration. The book, however, does not close in despair, but in hope, with two final chapters dedicated to the Ancient Appian Way, an invaluable historical heritage that has escaped devastation and could become part of a large archaeological park including Palatine, Colosseum, Forum and Circus Maximus, and to the new multiethnic city emerging in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Roma moderna has been for decades compulsory reading for anybody approaching the urban history of Rome from Italian unification to the present. It has also been a highly influential book: numerous scholars and observers have embraced and developed Insolera's perspective and interpretations. Others, namely Vittorio Vidotto, have criticized him for proposing an oversimplified ‘counter-history’ based on an utterly critical view of post-war urban development. In the last 20 years, Vidotto and some younger urban historians trained under his supervision (including Francesco Bartolini, Fernando Salsano, Alice Sotgia, Luciano Villani and myself) have proposed new approaches and/or provided more detailed and documented accounts of various aspects of the history of twentieth-century Rome. It is a pity that Insolera (and Berdini) did not engage in a dialogue with this new historiography in the last edition of Roma moderna. Needless to say, this does not alter the fact that this translation into English of a veritable classic of Italian urban history is certainly praiseworthy.