This book is aimed at a general audience, a pendant to M.'s earlier scholarly Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City (2015) and extending the reach back to the ancient period and forward to city of the twenty-first century. Because of its breadth – the classical world covers only about a chapter and a half – scholars of the ancient world will not find much, if anything, new; but there remains much of interest, especially for those who may be knowledgeable about the ancient city yet want a broad overview of the later periods and the development of the city into its current form. The book is divided into ten chapters, each focusing on a specific time period or key theme (e.g. Rome of the Popes or Mass Tourism) and containing an introductory historical sketch, a survey of well-chosen maps and a select bibliography (mostly in English, but includes titles in Italian and German).

A leitmotif that runs throughout the work is that Rome can be conceived of, and therefore visualized, in physical or allegorical terms or both. Engendered by a ‘subjective creator’ (p. 79), a map may reflect a blend of real and imagined space as well as the creator's idea of what Rome is or should be. And so, in the words of M., the book looks ‘primarily through the eyes of artists and mapmakers who have managed to capture something of its essence over the centuries’ (p. 2). What that essence is, of course, depends on the time period, perspective and aims of the mapmaker: consider the differences among the famous depiction of Rome as widow in Fazio degli Uberti's Dittamondo (1447, p. 60), Antonio Lafreri's influential but impressionistic map of the seven churches that was published for the Jubilee of 1575 (pp. 110–11), Giovanni Battista Piranesi's romanticised Pianta di Roma (1756, p. 35) or his wild reconstruction of the ancient Campus Martius (1762, p. 100), Giambattista Nolli's watershed 1748 measured ground plan (p. 133) and the two piani regolatori (‘master plans’) for Rome after it became the capital after reunification (1882, p. 164–5) and today, as the city looks towards a more sustainable future (2008, pp. 184–5).

In general the book is clean and beautifully produced, and the images are clear, many in vivid colour. While some of the maps are equipped with helpful labels and didactics, there are others that would have benefited from some, since they are hard to read and difficult to tease out even with M.'s characteristically clear exposition. I only noticed a few errors, such as the reversal of the titles of Panini's two vedute of Rome (pp. 122–3), but these are minor inconveniences. Classicists may balk at the old idea that the Octagonal Room of the Domus Aurea was the cenationum rotunda mentioned by Suetonius (Nero 31.2). I was also surprised by the absence of A. Carandini's massive two-volume Atlas of Ancient Rome (2017, translation and update of Atlante di Roma Antica [2012]). But these small issues do not detract from the book's overall quality and its innovative approach.