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Title:
Rome from the ground up

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Rome is not one city but many, each with its own history unfolding from a different center: now the trading port on the Tiber; now the Forum of antiquity; the Palatine of imperial power; the Lateran Church of Christian ascendancy; the Vatican; the Quirinal palace. Beginning with the very shaping of the ground on which Rome first rose, this book conjures all these cities, past and present, conducting the reader through time and space to the complex and shifting realities - architectural, historical, political, and social - that constitute Rome.

Title:
The stones of Venice

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$21.50
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John Ruskin, Victorian England's greatest writer on art and literature, believed himself an adopted son of Venice, and his feelings for this city are exquisitely expressed in "The Stones of Venice". This edition contains Ruskin's famous essay "The Nature of Gothic," a marvelously descriptive tour of Venice before its postwar restoration. As Ruskin wrote in 1851, "Thank God I am here, it is a Paradise of Cities."

Title:
The gates of paradise : Lorenzo Ghiberti's masterpiece

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$49.95
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In 1452, Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti unveiled a masterpiece that had been a quarter-century in the making: ten bronze panels depicting intricate scenes from the Old Testament. The monumental gilded bronze doors (each more than 15 feet tall) were designed for the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. Centuries of admirers have considered “The Gates of Paradise” one of the great masterworks of Western art. This extensively illustrated book displays the full glory and elaborate details of many of the newly restored bronze panels, the extraordinary work of the conservators and restorers who cleaned the priceless doors. In a series of fascinating chapters, expert contributors capture Ghiberti’s world, his remarkable talent at representing human emotion in rich illusionistic settings, the relationships between Renaissance patrons and artists, and the collaborations and rivalries among artists. Other chapters explore the challenging craft of bronze sculpture, Ghiberti’s casting and finishing techniques, and the painstaking process involved in documenting and restoring the treasured doors. A chronology of Ghiberti’s life completes this lavishly produced volume.

Title:
The Academia Belgica in Rome: Building for the arts and sciences in the eternal city

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$85.00
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This book is the first publication on the building of the Academia Belgica in Rome, a residence for Belgian researchers and artists and a centre for scientific and cultural activities. Constructed between 1937 and 1939 by the Italian Gino Cipriani and the Belgian Jean Hendrickx-Van den Bosch, in a style both modernist and Art Deco, the building has maintained not only its original exterior but also in large parts its interior decorations and even furniture. The authors investigate the conception and realisation of the original building and its interior design programme, within the context of the cultural and political exchange between Belgium and Italy in the inter-war period. This richly illustrated volume includes original photographs of the building and its furniture, architectural plans, drawings and designs, plus a new series of commissioned photographs of the building by Belgian architectural photographer Maxime Delvaux.

Title:
The allure of Rome: Maarten van Heemskerck draws the city, 1532

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$94.95
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In 1532, the Dutch painter Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) traveled from Haarlem to Rome. Pencil in hand, he discovered antiquity and the Renaissance. His remarkable drawings take us on a journey through time in sixteenth-century Rome. Van Heemskerck was everywhere, from the Colosseum to the Forum Romanum to the Piazza del Campidoglio. He was one of the first artists from north of the Alps to embark on a trip to Rome purely for the sake of art. His sketches reveal his admiration for the buildings and artworks of antiquity and the contemporary art of Raphael and Michelangelo. This magnificent volume invites the reader to discover van Heemkerck’s drawing technique, Roman topography, and the social network of the sixteenth century as well as the fascinating story of the restoration of his Roman sketchbook.

Title:
Walking Rome's waters

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$50.00
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Written by a leading expert on the water infrastructure of Rome, this grand tour offers a new way to appreciate the history, geology, and character of the ancient and contemporary city. Illustrated itineraries wind through Rome’s streets, piazzas, and gardens, following the trail of water as it flows, propelled by gravity, through different neighborhoods. In addition to mapping thirteen walking tours, Katherine Wentworth Rinne also pulls the reader underground—where hidden springs and streams still flow—to illuminate how Rome’s complex topography has been transformed since antiquity, as well as into the sky, imaginatively flying over Rome’s villas and parks to give readers a sense of the infrastructure through an aerial view.

Title:
Venice : the tourist maze

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"The tourist Venice is Venice," Mary McCarthy once observed--a sentiment very much in line with what most of the fourteen million tourists who visit the city each year experience, but at the same time a painful reality for the 65,000 Venetians who actually live there. Venice is viewed from a new perspective in this engaging book, which offers a heady, one-city tour of tourism itself. Conducting readers from the beginnings of Venetian tourism in the late Middle Ages to its emergence as a form of mass entertainment in our time, the authors explore what happens when today's "industrial tourism" collides with an ancient and ever-more-fragile culture. Giving equal consideration to those who tour Venice and those who live there, their book affords rare insight into just what it is that the touring and the toured see, experience, and elicit from each other.

Title:
The architecture of public space

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$95.00
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This new book by Labics, one of Italy’s leading architectural firms, is devoted to the country’s architecture of public space. Squares, galleries, loggias, porticoes, and courtyards are the elements that characterize Italy’s historic towns and cities—and that make the experience of these public spaces intense and attractive. Labics sets out to explore these enchanting spaces, to analyze their history and typologies, and to document and describe them through newly produced photographs, plans, and diagrams. They offer a taxonomy of solutions that, as a whole, forms a timeless theory for the design of public spaces. ''The architecture of public ppace'' forms a captivating collection of image material that visually decodes the characteristic core elements of Italian architecture and specifies their role in the definition of public space. The volume highlights the architectural solutions from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries that produce the particular spatial quality of these urban structures and sets out how they were originally established for and are continuing to be used by the people.

Title:
The foundation of Rome

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This book deals with `the historical anthropology of the ancient world', investigating the way in which Romans represented the founding figure of Romulus and the foundation of Rome in the mid-8th century BC, rather than examining whether it really did happen that way. Augusto Fraschetti presents the history of the foundation of Rome as it existed in the writings of historians such as Tacitus and Livy, by poets such as Ovid and by Cicero. In examining events in the life of Romulus, such as his war-making skills, his troubled relationship with the senate and the dismemberment of his body, Fraschetti asks whether authors exploited these episodes to comment upon actual events such as the assassination of Casear. This book is also about how Romans during the reign of Augustus, created their own history in order to account for and justify their future imperial glory, at the cost of their republican ideals. Appendices examine the ambiguous figure of Tarpeia and the archaeological discovery of a piece of wall at the foot of the Palatine Hill which has been dated to the 8th century BC. Translated from the Italian by Marian Hill and Kevin Windle.

Title:
Dominion of the eye: urbanism, art, and power in early modern Florence

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$71.00
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Trachtenberg's book exmines the urban transformation of Florence in the fourteenth century. Focusing on the creation of the Piazza della Signoria and the Piazza del Duomo, he documents in engaging detail how and why urban planners, in league with the civic government, enlarged these urban spaces. Articulating the design principles that served as the foundation for these urban renewal projects, Trachtenberg's book fundamentally revises our understanding of urban planning in the early modern period, countering the received claim that rational planning begins only in the Renaissance.