The Architecture Lover’s Guide to Rome by Elizabeth F. Heath

If you have a travel bucket list, I’m willing to bet that Rome is right up there at the top. The Eternal City’s history goes back thousands of years, with the architecture to show for it. But whether or not you board that plane to Italy, you can explore Rome through a brand-new book, The Architecture Lover’s Guide to Rome by Elizabeth F. Heath (White Owl, February 2020).

* Complimentary book received for review. This post contains affiliate links.

This fascinating guidebook is compact enough to pack in your suitcase if you are indeed lucky enough to visit Rome, and it will definitely help you be an informed tourist. For those of us who are mainly armchair travelers, Heath offers us the chance to tour Rome virtually, learning about its history through its magnificent architecture.

Right from the introduction, Heath shares her deep understanding of how architecture reflects the society that creates it, and in the case of Rome, how a succession of inhabitants utilize, adapt, and build on the architecture of their predecessors. As she says, “architecture has evolved organically in a city that’s been continuously occupied for nearly 3,000 years. Rome has never been frozen in time – it’s been an evolving, constantly changing city since its inception. It’s never completely intact and it’s rarely pristine….Instead, the architecture of Rome is the stage set on which a dynamic, living city goes about its daily business.”

Rather than trying to cram every historical site in Rome into the book, Heath presents a carefully selected collection of architectural highlights of what she describes as a “complicated chronology and overlapping layers of styles, periods and modifications…that demonstrate the practical, political and spiritual uses of architecture in Rome, what each building represented at its zenith, and what each has come to represent since.”

To me, the most quintessential structures in Rome are the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, and St. Peter’s Basilica, and all three are covered in The Architecture Lover’s Guide to Rome. Of course, many lesser-known buildings are included as well, such as San Nicola in Carcere (“Saint Nicholas in Prison”), described as a “mostly eleventh-century church” built on the site of an ancient produce market called the Forum Horitorium and which actually incorporates parts of three Roman-era temples and has an archeological site beneath it. So much history in one place—it’s amazing!

Reading through the book, you’ll learn of many other equally noteworthy places as well as many of Rome’s famous and not-so-famous inhabitants throughout history. The photographs will have you admiring everything from ancient crumbling ruins to opulent Baroque interiors to modern museums. If Rome is not on your bucket list yet, you’ll be adding it after reading The Architecture Lover’s Guide to Rome. In the meantime, do consider picking up a copy of this very interesting book for yourself or for anyone you know who loves travel, architecture, or history, especially if a trip to Rome is being planned.

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