Venturini's book brings together for the first time all the mosaics found in a hundred years of work at Cyrene, a total of 121 pavements ranging from the Hellenistic period to the fifth century a.d., thirty-seven of which were previously unpublished; a further seventeen have barely been mentioned in print before. The catalogue includes many recent finds, but also well-known material from older excavations, which was in need of re-evaluation in light of new discoveries and developments in mosaic studies. Cyrenaica occupies a fascinating place in the history of mosaics, at the intersection between Hellenistic, Roman and Punic flooring traditions, and this volume represents a significant advance in our knowledge of mosaics from the region.

The book is dominated by illustrations. There are over 140 plates, with photographs of almost every mosaic, including colour images of figured motifs and selected non-figural elements, complemented by reconstruction drawings, photographs of stratigraphy and other key dating evidence, and aerial views and plans showing how the mosaics fitted into their architectural setting. A series of topographical plans shows the locations of the mosaics within the city. There is also a twenty-one-page illustrated glossary of motifs, cross-referenced to the standard descriptions in C. Balmelle et al., Le décor géométrique de la mosaïque romaine (2002), and accompanied by lists of the mosaics on which each motif occurs. Unfortunately the quality of the photographs is variable, and low contrast makes some of them quite hard to read, but this is unavoidable to some extent, as mosaics in situ are notoriously difficult to photograph well.

The catalogue is organized topographically, dividing the city into nine regions; concordances with the mosaics ordered by date and technique are helpfully provided at the end. The catalogue entries are concise, but clear and consistently formatted. Their user-friendliness is somewhat limited by the decision to refer to motifs by their numbers in the illustrated glossary rather than by name, which — though economical — makes the descriptions very difficult to follow without referring to the glossary pages at the same time. This, combined with the organization of the plates, where the stratigraphical photographs and house-plans are at the end, separated from the images of the mosaics themselves, means that the reader spends a lot of time flipping backwards and forwards in the book in order to get a complete picture of each mosaic. It is also sometimes difficult to locate the mosaics on the house-plans; including room numbers in the catalogue entries or catalogue numbers on the plans would have been helpful. It would also have been useful to include a bibliography for each mosaic in the catalogue. But these are fairly minor issues: having all the information collected in one book will be of great value to future researchers.

The relatively brief text surveys the mosaics chronologically, focusing primarily on dating, typology, motifs and parallels, rather than context and function, although in the longest chapter, on the mosaics of the second and third centuries a.d. (the largest group by some way, accounting for about half of the catalogue), there are sections devoted to mosaics in temples, in which Cyrene is particularly rich, and to the twenty-seven floors from the spectacular House of Jason Magnus. The mosaics are mostly dated by parallels rather than stratigraphic evidence, and V.'s approach is generally tentative; given the tendency for stylistic and technical traditions to persist over several centuries in Cyrene (noted, for example, on 21), this seems wise.

A concluding section sets mosaic production at Cyrene in the wider context of Cyrenaica and the Mediterranean as a whole. V. identifies influences from multiple directions: the mosaics tend to follow the Hellenistic tradition of concentric compositions, with picture-panels designed for a single viewpoint, but many of the decorative motifs are borrowed from Italy, and the presence of pavements in opus signinum (red mortar) and opus figlinum (large terracotta tesserae) reflects Punic influence. This is especially interesting in relation to the Hellenistic period, where it seems increasingly likely that Punic paving fashions and techniques played a rôle in the early development of tessellated mosaic. V.'s catalogue almost triples the number of Hellenistic mosaics known at Cyrene, from eight published by Ida Baldassare in 1976 (QAL 8 (1976), 193–221) to twenty-three, and the new material enables him to identify possible links with Alexandria, Sicily and the Punic cities of North Africa. Combined with recent finds of early Hellenistic mosaics in mixed materials at Euesperides (Lloyd et al., Libyan Studies 29 (1998), 145–68; Wilson et al., Libyan Studies 34 (2003), 191–200; Wootton, Libyan Studies 35 (2004), 155–8), this adds an important new element to the complex picture of the development of mosaics in the Hellenistic Mediterranean.

In short, V.'s book is a significant contribution to our understanding of mosaic fashions in a region that lay at the centre of Mediterranean social and economic networks, and it will be an invaluable resource for research on mosaics of all periods, from the Hellenistic through to Late Antiquity.