The Prince of Antiquarians is the first full-length study of Francesco Ficoroni, the most important of the Roman antiquarian guides, or cicerone, of the first half of the eighteenth century. Ridley presents the biography as an attempt to redress the balance in the history of Rome’s archaeology, which hitherto, he suggests, has been largely blind to developments prior to Johann Wincklemann and the Comte de Caylus. While he is surely right to press the case for taking the work of earlier generations of antiquaries more seriously, his characterisation somewhat underplays important contributions that have done precisely that, notably from Tamara Anne Griggs and François de Polignac, both of whose work is cited in this volume.

The Rome of the Grand Tour was predicated upon Enlightenment values of universalism and cosmopolitanism: Rome was the inheritance of all of educated and civilised Europe and it was this (among other factors) that drew so many travellers – and, in particular, Englishmen – to the city to study its antiquities and to purchase antiquities. Cosmopolitanism provided the context in which Ficoroni was able to prosper, through acting as both a guide and a dealer, but his frame of reference was unequivocally local. Like his antiquarian colleagues in England, Ficoroni was driven by a powerful sense of local patriotism and a drive to recover the antiquities of his native region. He was also an outsider: he was not ordained and had a limited education (he knew no Greek and was acutely aware of his own shortcomings as a writer), he did not have entrée to the circles of eruditi, nor did he have private means. He was a practical antiquary, who earned his living through providing courses of antiquities and through dealing in them; he was not a connoisseur. His earliest publication, Osservazione, was a polemical rebuttal of the inaccuracies and omissions that he had detected in Bernard de Montfaucon’s Diarium Italicum – inspired, so he said, by the numbers of his former students who contacted him, puzzled by the apparent contradictions and disagreements between his own lectures and Montfaucon’s text. But, as Ridley shows, this was also the assertion of local, empirical expertise by an antiquary with hands-on knowledge against the speculations of the study-bound scholar dependent only upon textual authorities. Ficoroni was also a devout Catholic: keen to champion the Catholic church against the criticisms of his Protestant clients. Whereas Protestant clergy such as Joseph Spence deplored the appropriation of Roman monuments by the Catholic church and insisted upon referring to them by their Classical names, for Ficoroni the Catholic appropriation was part of an historical process that could not and should not be reversed.

The most substantive and illuminating parts of this book relate to Ficoroni’s activities as an excavator and an archaeologist. Ficoroni’s notes cover more than 130 excavations during his life-time and provide an essential summary of excavations during this period (Ridley helpfully includes a chronology as an appendix). At a time when so much doubt surrounded the identification and location of Rome’s monuments, excavations were in effect ‘treasure hunts’ with little or no thought given to preservation of the structures that were uncovered or to making records of what had been found. Ficoroni, as Ridley shows, realised that the excavations could be productive of knowledge in their own right rather than simply being a source of antiquities for collectors’ cabinets. Accordingly he kept – for his time – meticulous records: he employed artists to make drawings of the discoveries that were at risk of being ‘wilfully and totally’ destroyed as soon as all the items deemed to be of value had been removed. Similarly, he argued the case for preservation of excavated mausolea, realising that these had the potential to attract the curiosity of visitors in their own right, aside from their inherent value as historical records. Lacking private means, Ficoroni could not compete with the elite collectors of the day, but he was nonetheless a key figure in the Republic of Letters, with correspondence networks extending across Europe (again, helpfully listed in a biographical register). He necessarily focused his own collecting upon smaller, low value items – such as inscriptions recovered from mausolea (of which he had more than 600 stored around his house at one point), lead seals and, most famously, theatre masks. These he used in both the economy of mutual obligation and exchange upon which the Republic depended, and to establish his own reputation as an antiquary through publication, which he undertook at his own cost.

Other, shorter chapters focus on topics ranging from Ficoroni’s interest in numismatics and epigraphy to his honours (awarded and erroneously claimed) and his generosity. This does make for somewhat fragmented reading, as the organisation tends towards compilation of information relating to Ficoroni rather than using Ficoroni to open up the cultural and intellectual world of antiquarianism and archaeology in Rome during his life-time. But for anyone who wishes to pursue that aim, this book represents the essential starting point.