Rome from the Ground Up (From the Ground Up)

Hardcover - 01 November, 2005 - Belknap Press
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By: James H S McGregor
ISBN: 0674019113

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Reviews by readers

Entertaining and enlightening

Rome from the Ground Up will entertain and enlighten both frequent visitors to Rome and those who have yet to see the city, both the determined walker of itineraries and the armchair traveler. Those intending to use the book as a guide should turn first to the last chapter, "Information," where McGregor describes the itinerary traced in each of the book's historical chapters and provides both the briefest and most practical guide I have seen to useful information for visitors to Rome. (Harvard University Press has made this entire chapter, as well as current links to the websites recommended there by McGregor, available on its website, www.hup.harvard.edu.) The illustrations are colorful and have been chosen to complement the text; the historical maps on the endpapers show both the entire plan of the classical city and the most important regions of the post-classical city (the Vatican, Trastevere, and the Campo Marzio). It is the combination of elegant prose with sharp observation, however, which makes McGregor an ideal cicerone from geologic time and the Tiber's carving out of Rome's canyons through the most recent Jubilee and the very mixed signs for Rome's future.

The Key to Rome

This is a great book. It must be daunting to attempt to write a new book about Rome, about which everything has already been said, and said better. But this is a truly imaginative and original book. I've been to Rome several times and love the city and I own several guide books. But this is my favorite book on Rome. It is useful as a guide book but is really a long scholarly essay on the city bringing up-to-date scholarship into focus and creating a vivid sense of the city as it was at various moments in its history. The problem with Rome is that almost everywhere you look around you are surrounded with the remnants of classical times, Mediaeval, Renaissance and Baroque Romes all mixed together. But "Rome from the Ground up" brings to life a series of cities which existed in succession as the result of changing natural and cultural and historical forces. Usually the more detailed a guide book is the more it fails to capture the likeness of the city it is portraying, but this one manages to be very detailed, and to succeed especially well at sketching the perspectives into which everything fits.
The illustrations are small, but they are extremely well photographed and selected to go with the text. The alternation between the high quality contemporary photographs and the engravings of architectural facades and plans, and paintings is beautiful. And the two historical maps which are the endpapers of the book are very helpful in imagining what the city looked like "then" which is what one is always doing when walking in Rome.
This is the one book on Rome you will want to own as the key to all the other books on Rome you may have.

Comprehensive and Illuminating

I thought I knew Rome well after living there for several months studying its' architecture, art, and urban structure, but I was constantly delighted by this book's comprehensive scope and illuminative details. McGregor's method of looking at each era of the city through a region's buildings, urban fabric, and artistic treasures is a great way of organizing what can otherwise be an impossible avalanche of information. This method may not be for everyone - if want to pick up a book to find out who built a particular part of the Lateran under what pope, buy the Blue Guide. If you want to know why something was built and how that "why" has affected the physical structure of the city over millennia, this is the book for you. The photographs are magnificent and correlate well with the text, and as for the lack of maps, IMHO you're better off buying a pocket map for a couple of Euro that shows the entire area at a decent scale in order to get a handle on the whole thing, rather than a wee page-sized map that doesn't do the subject justice let alone help you find your way around.

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