Regarding Romantic Rome, a series of ten essays edited and introduced by Richard Wrigley, casts new light on a subject almost as well trodden as the streets of the famed city itself. The fruit of a conference held in 2003 at the British School in Rome with the cooperation of the Art History Department of Oxford Brookes University, this slim tome brings together scholars from a wide variety of fields including literature, graphic design, women’s studies, and European history. Despite the many previous books on the subject,¹ the introduction states that the authors return to Rome, not to revisit the city as the repository of antiquity or the Ur-city of classical revival, but rather to study “Rome as a social, urban space, with its own institutions, patterns of life, and topography” (9). An important theme in the book is the clash between the Rome of the mind and the physical city: “The essays bear witness to the considerable array of constraints, interruptions, distractions and obstacles experienced by those who found themselves confronted by the somewhat unpalatable or undigestible task of focusing on Rome as a real, tangible entity” (10). The interdisciplinarity of the publication allows readers to view Rome from shifting, and even conflicting, perspectives: tourist literature, sanitation guides, Romantic poetry, urban anthropology. The ruin of Rome—its filth, its crime, its urban decay—was conflated with the ruins of Rome, and this became an inevitable part of its charm and further proof of its antiquity during the Romantic period. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of the book is the way in which the essays deconstruct mythic Rome—as in Richard Wrigley’s essay on dirt—without destroying its allure.

As many of the essays attest, the ability to experience this “other” Rome required a willing blind-spot, a refusal to engage with the familiar Rome of monuments and vistas. This is most persuasively and fascinatingly argued by Sophie Thomas in “Seeing Past Rome,” which acknowledges Rome as being, on some level, a “virtual city,” a place “where we inhabit the past, rather than the present” (137). Using works by J. W. Goethe, in particular his Italian Journey of 1786, as well as those of Percy and Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, Thomas explores the friction between the “eternal” Rome and the “historical self-consciousness of Romanticism,” often figured through a literal blindness. A fascinating, if too brief, essay by Brian Grosskurth shows the way in which the composer Hector Berlioz experienced Rome not as the more familiar visual topos of famous monuments and views, but as a “sonic swamp,” a cacophony of sound that mirrored his own despair and the tumult of the city around him.

Many of the essays treat the appearance, or reappearance, of the Roman “essence” in more modern manifestations. Stephen Bann looks at Léopold Robert, an artist credited as one of the creators of Romantic Rome in his paintings of colorful peasant life, and lauded by nineteenth-century critics for “revert[ing] to the feeling of the antique without passing by way of statuary” (71). As Bann explains, the paintings became the perfect vehicle to express the “afterlife of the antique” (a concept given its full measure in Aby Warburg’s writings on the pathosformeln). In the same way that Robert’s paintings were seen as expressions of the Roman spirit in modern form, so too did the stereotypes of the trasteverini (inhabitants of the Trastevere district, or rione), treated in an essay by Massimo Cattaneo, attempt to cast these Romans as the living embodiment of the ancients, the “direct descendants from ancient Rome,” embodied in their physical virility, beauty, and fiery violence. In “Reanimating the Romans: Mary Shelley’s Response to Ancient Ruins,” Isobel Hurst focuses on the writer’s emotional attachment to the city, expressed through her literary creations. Just as she came to know the city first through ancient writings, her reanimation of it (a theme well taken up in Thomas’s essay) occurs in the realm of fiction. Her novel The Last Man (1826) and story “Valerius: The Reanimate Roman” (1819) may stand as metonyms for the British appropriation of the city in the nineteenth century, mixing past and present, British and Italian, fact and fiction.

Wrigley’s wonderful essay, “‘It was dirty, but it was Rome’: Dirt, Digression and the Picturesque,” goes right to the underside of the famed city: “In this essay I will suggest that, rather than being an indecorous flipside to the prestigious outer façade of the Eternal City, we should understand the experience of the assembled set pieces and itineraries of Rome’s antiquities, art and architecture as being intimately connected, both physically and conceptually, to problems of cleanliness and hygiene. As we shall see, dirt and rubbish occupy a peculiarly pivotal position at the intersection of aesthetic, medical, and ultimately political, commentaries on Rome” (158). As in many other times and places—for example nineteenth-century Paris or early twentieth-century immigrant New York—the filth of the city was both a real phenomenon and a powerful metaphor for a host of “undesirable” traits of class and ethnicity. For writers such as John Ruskin and George Augustus Sala, the insalubriousness of Rome stemmed from its popular Catholicism: “Would you tell me, if you please, why it is that the most orthodox Catholic cities always stink so intolerably? It is the odour of sanctity, I suppose” (Sala, quoted on p. 160). In a brilliant turn, Wrigley links the discourse on public sanitation to the early nineteenth-century discourse, originating in France, that justified the plundering and appropriation of artworks as an attempt to rescue them from debris and detritus. This intermingling of discourses from the realms of museology, aesthetics, anthropology, and public policy surely has echoes in some of the debates on cultural patrimony taking place in our own times.

If Romantic Rome gave birth to a new fusion of the antique city and the colorful, if dirty, nineteenth-century one, it also saw the rise of Rome as a popular tourist destination. Anne Bush’s essay, “The Roman Guidebook as a Cartographic Space,” literally charts new ground. In contrast to earlier travel literature for the Grand Tour, guidebooks of the Romantic era carefully partitioned its monuments and districts into easily consumable form. While the wealthy Grand Tour traveler had ample time and money to visit the city, the less affluent tourists targeted by John Murray’s and Karl Baedecker’s guidebooks needed a more summary, thorough, and clearly ordered presentation of sites. The Rome that emerges from the chapters and maps of these nineteenth-century texts is at once more knowable and more circumscribed. It might be a fascinating project to compare this trend in guidebooks to the historiography of museums and the writing of history in the nineteenth century, which likewise saw a shift from the discursive to the more systematic and comprehensive. (On this see the writings of Susan Pearce, i.e., Museums, Objects, and Collections, Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1993.)

While the finest essays in the book contribute something new and important to a well-studied topic, others fall short of the ambitious mark set in Wrigley’s introduction, which in turn might have been expanded to tie together some of the more interesting themes of the essays, or in some cases to contrast them. The notion of “reanimating” Rome that characterizes many of the texts and works discussed in various essays stands in striking contrast to Wrigley’s contribution, which ends with Ruskin’s image of Rome as decayed and entombed, yet this dialectic is never explored. (Strangely absent from this collection is any discussion of the nineteenth-century fascination with Rome’s catacombs, a subject that would have fit in beautifully.)

Many of the essays are simply too short, hovering around ten pages, to really engage their topics, and they often end abruptly. Such is the case with Cattaneo’s “Trastevere: Myth, Stereotype, and Reality of a Roman rione in the 18th–19th Centuries,” which includes four full pages of demographic data, leaving only ten pages to explore the interesting subject. The opening essay by Wendy Wassyng Roworth, “Pulling Parrhasius’s Curtain: Trickery and Fakery in the Roman Art World,” examines the intriguing instances of Anton Raphael Mengs and Antonio Canova’s fakery of a classical and Renaissance painting, respectively. The essay stops short of truly illuminating the issue of fakery, however, or in speculating why so many critics and even artists in eighteenth-century Rome were so readily taken in. Andreas Vejvar’s “Karl Philipp Moritz’s Die neue Cecilia, Rome, and the Concept of Creative Suffering,” might have been of interest to specialists of Moritz, or even German Romantic literature, but is largely inaccessible to those outside this field. For example, the second line of the essay compares the self-destruction of the beloved to “the cutting of Philomele’s tongue or Doctor Sauer’s look at the ‘Stygian River’," references meaningless to this reader. No summary of the plot is given, as the author assumes familiarity with this rather obscure late text by Moritz. Nor are readers told what Rome Moritz experienced beyond visiting St. Peter’s dome. The essay attempts to answer the question: “in what sense can one speak of a concept of creative suffering?” (43) but takes up this theme only in the penultimate paragraph of the essay.

Overall, the book could have used more stringent editing. Numerous typos (“Bann” for “Bann’s,” “sad” for “said,” “antient” for “ancient”) become distracting after a while. No general or even cursory bibliography is offered because the scope of the topic “means that any attempt to provide some kind of bibliographical survey would be an ambitious enterprise” (11). Strangely enough, the massive 2003 exhibitions of Maestà di Roma (Maestà di Roma. Universale ed Eterna. Capitale delle Arti, exh. cat., Milan: Electa, 2003; and Maestà di Roma. D’Ingres à Degas. Les artistes francais à Rome, exh. cat., Milan: Electa, 2003), mentioned in Wrigley’s introduction, are never cited or mentioned. The first names of artists and authors are neglected, even at first reference. Nor do all of the essays mine the “real” Rome instead of the mythic antique city or deliver what they promise. Nonetheless, the complex and rich aims stated in Wrigley’s introduction are fully achieved in a handful of the essays in the book. These alone make it well worth reading and convince, as ever, that Rome is always worth regarding and revisiting.