Rome We Have Lost

For a thousand years Rome was enshrined in myth and legend as the Eternal City. No Grand Tour would be complete without a visit to its ruins. But from 1870 all that changed. A millennium ended as its solitary moonlit ruins became floodlit monuments on traffic islands and its perimeter shifted from the ancient nineteen-kilometre wall with twelve gates to a fifty-kilometre ring road with thirty-three roundabouts and spaghetti junctions. <p/><em>The Rome We Have Lost</em> is the first full investigation of this change. John Pemble musters popes emperors writers exiles and tourists to weave a rich fabric of Roman experience. He tells the story of how why and with what consequences that Rome centre of Europe and the world became a national capital: no longer central and unique but marginal and very similar in its problems and its solutions to other modern cities with a heavy burden of 'heritage'. <p/>This far-reaching book illuminates the historical significance of Rome's transformation and the crisis that Europe is now confronting as it struggles to re-invent without its ancestral centre -- the city that had made Europe what it was and defined what it meant to be European.<br>