‘Do try to spend as much time as you can in the Forum and Palatine’, wrote Professor Momigliano to one of his students embarking on his first visit to Rome. For that student of ancient history, Claridge's guide would have been the perfect companion, over a fifth of it giving due emphasis to these most historic parts of the city, already a thousand years old when the forum was remodelled after a disastrous fire in ad 283.

This is a guide to the sites and monuments of Rome from her origins to the sixth century ad, a huge task given the quantity of material in a city where archaeological deposits can be up to 20m deep and whose bounds were larger than those of medieval and Renaissance Rome. Claridge and her contributors have placed great emphasis on primary sources of evidence for everything, both in the introduction and in their description in the guide section and in the immensely detailed bibliography at the end, which is packed with references to Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum and ancient authors as well as modern authorities. The use of Roman coins illustrating buildings is also a feature. The first sixty-page historical overview makes much use of documentary and other ancient sources, giving primary sources first. After each period, there is a brief list of its surviving monuments or finds. Then follow interesting sections on types of building materials, building techniques and Rome's major public works.

Some strange sites are included: the exotic tomb of the baker, Eurysaces (c 30–20 bc), with dough bins for the columns and the ‘medallions’ above, and an inscription to his dead wife whose remains are ‘in this bread bin’. The Tabularium was a sort of muniment tower for the safe keeping of documents, more familiar to us in the Middle Ages. Claridge's cut-off date means that early Christian buildings are included with the classical, so Santo Stefano Rotondo gets three pages, two plans and a reconstruction elevation. The wealthy medieval merchant, Lorenzo Manlio, dated the building of his house from the foundation of Rome and proudly claimed descent from an ancient Roman gens. Then, as now, the remains of ancient Rome could not but influence its citizens.

No wonder, then, that the text is densus et brevis in places, simply in order to cover everything; but elsewhere Claridge's style is enlivened with phrases such as ‘all hell broke loose’ after the death of Alexander Severus; or the Altar of Augustan Peace, assembled by the Fascist regime and restyled, ‘to put it mildly’, in 2006; and ‘there's always hope’ for the eventual re-opening of Nero's Golden House to the public. In a scattering of short essays throughout the guide, one can pause to read about the conservation of Romulus’ hut described by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, characters around the Forum in Plautus’ day, Suetonius’ description of Nero's Golden House, the Ludi Saeculares, ‘Madam Lucretia’ and other curiosities, scattered amongst Claridge's descriptions of the truly great monuments of ancient Rome.

There are plentiful plans and sketches, all monochrome, and the former not as clear as the two-colour plans in Coarelli's guide to Rome and Environs (2007), so the amount of information Claridge needs to include sometimes seems overcrowded. Page 344 refers to fig 153 for the remains of the Claudian aqueduct which runs through the gardens of Villa Wolkonsky (the British ambassador's residence and therefore consolidated by our Ministry of Works; drawings in the NMR), but they are better shown in fig 169.

Lastly, there is a guide to the principal contents of Rome's seventeen museums of classical antiquities. The National Roman Museum, founded in 1889 in the Baths of Diocletian, has since grown into six separate locations. The history of these, the Capitoline Museums, which constitute the oldest public collections in the modern world, the Vatican Museum, the Museo della Civiltà Romana (with its Maryport altar, RIB 831, presented in 1935) and the Museum of the Early Middle Ages, is summarized by Claridge with Judith Toms (who also wrote the guide to the catacombs), as is the collecting and public display of antiquities by ancient Rome herself.

I found just one typo (‘p. 00’ on p 487), while p 460 refers to a non-existent fig 216. But why does OUP render rome all in lower case on the cover?

Reading this guide only makes one want to visit many places missed forty years ago, old favourites, now much better presented, and new sites and museums that have subsequently become available. This is an excellent guide, as one would expect from someone who was for fourteen years assistant director of the British School at Rome.

Coarelli, F 2007. Rome and Environs, Berkeley: University of California Press