Palladio’s Rome offers an unusual recreation of the Renaissance city in the words of the celebrated architect from northern Italy. Palladio made several visits to Rome when he was still an aspiring architect, producing a pair of guidebooks that were published in 1554—one an introduction to the ancient city (The Antiquities of Rome), and the other a companion guide to the churches of contemporary Rome (Description of the Churches). In keeping with standard practice of the time, the texts are brief and unillustrated, but the contents are surprising given the identity of the author.

Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks have edited and translated both guidebooks, combining them for convenience in a single volume. The form of the book is novel because the size and shape resemble a modern-day Michelin (though not a sixteenth-century guide). Thus it beckons the traveler, armchair or otherwise. Printed on sturdy, glossy paper, the text has exquisite illustrations with multiple views of Renaissance Rome to satisfy a desire for the visual; sketches, prints, illustrations from treatises, and maps evoke a vanished city. But best are the color plates—views of familiar sites from new angles, and buildings that are seldom reproduced, especially churches. With city maps at the beginning, Palladio’s Rome makes an attractive guidebook for today’s traveler. Nonetheless its weight makes it likely that only a dedicated Romanist will tote it around, and so one hopes for a paperback edition in the future. In the meantime, the volume will find a logical place on our desks.

The introduction situates the guidebooks in the context of Palladio’s architectural training and intellectual development. It links them to the architect’s better-known publications: the illustrated edition of Vitruvius for Daniele Barbaro (1556), Four Books on Architecture (1570), and Commentaries of Julius Cesaer (1575). A section on earlier Roman guidebooks suggests that Palladio found inspiration in Leon Battista Alberti’s investigations of the ancient city (1444) and Raphael’s reconstruction (ca. 1519), in addition to works by other humanists. A brief account of the itineraries invented by Palladio for The Churches follows. The four routes are overlaid on maps of modern Rome. Finally, Hart and Hicks present their view that the books are important because they are a turning point for Palladio. They see them as a “transitional” phase in his evolution from craftsman to an architect in the humanist tradition. In keeping with this theme, they make a distinction between The Churches and The Antiquities. They characterize the former as “medieval” and indicative of Palladio’s “Christian faith,” whereas the latter guidebook is called a work of “antiquarian scholarship” and “more rational, modern.”

Hart and Hicks have produced a fluid English translation that rectifies inconsistencies in the 1742 translation of The Antiquities by James Leoni and the 1991 translation of The Churches (Eunice Howe, Andrea Palladio: The Churches of Rome, Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 22, 1991). Both guidebooks became familiar to the modern reader through Peter Murray’s facsimile reprint (Five Early Guides to Rome and Florence, Farnborough, UK: Gregg, 1972). Douglas Lewis excerpted key passages of The Antiquities for his exhibition catalogue of Palladio’s drawings (The Drawings of Andrea Palladio, Washington, DC: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1981), and Lionello Puppi transcribed the Italian texts (Andrea Palladio, scritti sull’architettura [1554–1579] , Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1988). It is accurate, however, to say that this is the only time that the pair of guidebooks have appeared together in English, and certainly the first attempt to illustrate them.

The text of the guidebooks is followed by an appendix containing the Letter to Leo X (ca. 1519) composed by Raphael and Baldassar Castiglione. The famous missive has no formal connection to Palladio’s Antiquities of Rome, but is instructive in offering a nuanced assessment of the ancient city which, in fact, is to be distinguished from Palladio’s own.

The editors’ commentary enhances the narrative, particularly in the notes to The Antiquities. They draw on Richard Krautheimer (Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) for medieval Rome, and update Christian Huelsen (Le chiese di Roma nel medio evo, Florence: Olschki, 1927) and Mariano Armellini (Le chiese di Roma dal secolo IV al XIX, ed. Carlo Cecchelli, 2 vols., Rome: Edizioni R.O.R.E. di N. Ruffolo, 1942) on the churches. Flipping pages in order to consult endnotes is tiresome, however. One reads the introduction and Letter to Leo X with comparative ease due to notes at the bottom of the page. The index is comprehensive, with the exception of churches named in the Stations of the Cross (160–76)—a minor point, to be sure. A few slips on names and dates appear, but do not detract from the substantive commentary.

Yet, I have misgivings concerning Hart’s and Hicks’s central point that Palladio’s guidebooks demand attention primarily because they represent a pivotal moment in his development. Specifically, they identify The Churches with his early spiritual beliefs and The Antiquities with his emerging engagement with humanist ideas and rediscovery of the classical past. It is an attractive narrative—one that echoes Vasari’s paradigm of artistic evolution from derivative to innovative, or simple to complex. Indeed, it is tempting to juxtapose the guidebooks, one deemed conservative and the other inspired, and to draw parallels with Palladio’s architectural experience before and after Rome. However, as tantalizing as it is to make such distinctions, they are perhaps too neat. The approach also reinforces the questionable notion of a rupture between Medieval and Renaissance, characterizing the former as religious and the latter secular, and pitting one against the other. Finally, I have a different opinion about the very nature of Palladio’s guidebooks. Whereas Hart and Hicks treat the guidebooks as scholarly treatises—especially The Antiquities of Rome—I see both as belonging to a well-established genre within Roman guidebook tradition rather than exceptional works by their very exceptional author.

Despite some clever revisions, Palladio’s guidebooks are more derivative than original. Hart and Hicks point out that Palladio modeled The Churches after Libri Indulgentiarum, or Books of Indulgences, while they associate The Antiquities of Rome with newly acquired “antiquarian” learning. Yet, Palladio leaned on tradition here, too. It is true that he disparaged the medieval Mirabilia Romae, but so did others before him with what seems to have become a standard disclaimer. The author kept to the format of medieval companion volumes, as Albertini had done (1510). Palladio’s work demonstrates new archaeological knowledge, but hardly with the same consistency or depth as Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Fulvio, and Raphael; nor did he use comparable “scientific” methods. For instance, as the editors point out, Palladio diverges from the Mirabilia in his account of the number of ancient gates to Rome. But did the architect actually survey them, as he claimed? Did he even examine their remains first-hand? The descriptions in Palladio’s Antiquities of Rome have an anachronistic flavor, but I do not mean this disparagingly. For many years, the Mirabilia (which came to include both sacred and secular Rome) had remained the most popular guide to the city; and unlike some authors who abandoned the genre, Palladio chose not to.

So what was Palladio’s motivation? The architect’s five (or possibly four) trips to Rome were brief; his first-hand knowledge of the city was limited. Except for his last stay in 1554 with Daniele Barbaro, we are uncertain of his activities except that he probably designed the ciboria for the Church and Hospital of Santo Spirito in 1545–46, and possibly consulted on the design for the new St. Peter’s for Paul III (Eunice Howe, “The Authority of Tradition: Palladio and the Altar of the Hospital of Santo Spirito,” Storia dell’Arte 111, no. 11, 2005: 97–118). But he needed to familiarize himself with the antique; hence, the flurry of activity in 1554, indicated by his drawings of ancient baths (Laetitia Amelia La Follette, Palladio and the Baths of Trajan Decius: The Recovery of a Third-Century Bath Complex in Rome, PhD diss., Princeton University, 1986). At the same time, Palladio’s literary endeavors belong to the discourse of the Counter-Reformation.

To be sure, Hart and Hicks are correct in stressing the interdependence of The Churches and The Antiquities. With their publication, Palladio was able to establish himself as an authority on both Christian and classical Rome, demonstrating his expertise in ecclesiastical and classical traditions. To this end, he consulted, perhaps even emulated, famous guidebooks. His purpose was to a certain degree pragmatic, and fed into his self-representation as an expert who was able to show visitors how to appreciate and move around the whole city. He was successful only in part.

Later in life, Palladio turned to another kind of self-fashioning, one which emphasized his natural genius (Manuela Morresi, “Cooperation and Collaboration in Vicenza before Palladio: Jacopo Sansovino and the Pedemuro Masters at the High Altar of the Cathedral of Vicenza,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians LV, 1996:158–77). In his Four Books on Architecture, he fails to mention his early years in Rome, except to call forth the influence of his “mentor” Vitruvius. When his biographers, who began to write in the early seventeenth century, traced the trajectory of Palladio’s genius, they referred to The Antiquities as evidence of his early expertise on ancient Rome, which shored up his reputation as an architect whose name was synonymous with the classical tradition. On the other hand, they omitted The Churches, which was after all incompatible with their construction of the architect, and it dropped out of sight until recently. Now that the two books have been reunited, scholars will have the opportunity to further explore their significance both for Palladio and for literary representations of Renaissance Rome.