Book Description
In Houses, Villas, and Palaces in the Roman World, Alexander G. McKay examines simple houses, mansions, estates, and palatial buildings, and he pays particular attention to accounts of ancient writers that deal with such topics as house design, interiors, furnishings, and gardens. Describing innovative high-rise apartments, her compact civic squares, large public buildings, temples, shopping centers, and commercial areas, he shows that Roman civilization was astonishingly similar to our own. He also discusses the conditions of life in the Roman provinces, where recent discoveries have shed fresh light on private and communal living. McKay has enhanced the text by the inclusion of over 150 illustrations of plans, sites, and reconstructions.
Customer Reviews:
A Most Cruel and Inhuman Book!.......2000-06-06
This book has given me the incredible desire to take the rest of my life and do nothing except tour the archeological sites of classical Etruscan and Imperial Roman towns and cities! Alexander McKay- You are very cruel.
For many years I have seen pictures in books and online of fragments and ruins of buildings, which can be interesting but seeing the pictures in the context of a complete floor plan brings a sudden epiphany of how our forebearers lived. I spent 7 hours surfing on the net looking at the pictures online for a number of the palaces and houses included in this book and dreaming of an itinerary covering almost all of western Europe,northern Africa and great areas of the near and mid East. Now I need to go out and win a very large lottery to afford it.
Book Description
The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii in A.D. 79 also buried nearby Herculaneum. Over time the location of the small town was forgotten. Shortly after its rediscovery in the 1730s, excavations--more likely treasure hunts--were organized that unearthed ancient sculptures that had
survived the disaster. The richest finds were from a villa that came to be called the Villa dei Papiri, because it also yielded upward of a thousand papyrus rolls--the only library ever to have been recovered from the classical world. To the great excitement of contemporaries, the papyri held out
the tantalizing possibility of the rediscovery of lost masterpieces by classical writers.
Written for the general reader, this introduction to the ancient library describes the long and difficult history of attempts to unwind the damaged rolls. Sider discusses the texts that have been deciphered and puts them in the context of literacy and Roman society of the time. He describes the how
the ancient books were created from papyrus, and provides an account of attitudes toward books in Greece and Rome. He also surveys the private and civic libraries of the ancient world. This thoroughly researched and engaging book will be enjoyed by any reader with an interest in classical
studies.
Product Description
Have you ever dreamed about a few idyllic weeks in Italy, staying in a lovingly restored historic villa or apartment? Can you imagine yourself wandering through vibrant villages and towns, seeking out art treasures in tumble-down churches, and shopping for antiques, fine wines and the latest fashions along streets that have remained virtually unchanged for centuries? Does dining in rustic country trattorias, chic city restaurants, or even trying your hand at cooking authentic Italian meals in your own villa kitchen appeal to you? If you thought that this kind of vacation was only for the super-wealthy, you are in for a surprise.
Your Own Private Tuscany is the first guide that helps you turn this fantasy into an affordable reality.
Your Own Private Tuscany is not like other guides. It won't dictate where you should go or stay, what you should see, do, or eat, but it will give you all the tools required to custom-design a trip that suits your own personality and interests. In the pages of the guide you will find explanations of what to expect in an Italian rental, the reasons that vacation rentals are vastly superior to hotels, and specific instructions for finding a rental on the Internet at a price that is within your means. There are descriptions of regions to visit, the probable costs involved in renting, and tips on car rental, driving, and travelling with groups and children. Instructions on dining out and shopping in family-run stores, supermarkets and outdoor markets are spelled out for you. You'll even find reviews of rental agencies and guidebooks, and cookbook recommendations to help you prepare superb meals. So what are you waiting for? The holiday of a lifetime is closer than you think.
Customer Reviews:
Vacation Rental Guide.......2007-07-09
This was a great little book. Easy, quick read - lays out the questions to ask when considering a vacation rental in Italy. Definitely identified things I had not considered, that I will definitely include when narrowing down our rental.
A Must-Read if Your Are Planning a Vacation Rental in Italy.......2005-08-12
Sensible and well written, Ms. Jennings' "how-to" for renting a vacation villa in Italy is a great investment for hunting, evaluating and enjoying your vacation. As a vacation rental expert, I found every aspect of her book helpful and clearly explained. I am encouraging my clients to purchase this books for many reasons: it lays out the pros/cons of rentals, helps in choosing location and type of rental, explains the owner's perspective and offers advice on how to share a rental. The general travel advice is solid and helpful. The most useful aspects -- you won't find them anyplace -- are the tutorial and check lists on how to evaluate rental properties remotely. I evaluate many properties and assure you she knows all the secret ways that owners use to disguise problems with their rentals. She also lists trustworthy rental agencies and many helpful resources.
Pat Byrne, Excellent Europe - Vacation Rentals in Italy
Customer Reviews:
Some educational value and straightforward assembly.......1997-02-03
The serious modeler of card or paper models will be disappointed. For the beginer and a model to supplement studies, this should suffice. This model would be attractive to the advanced card modeler except for a fault in the design. The fondation (the very bottom piece that the structures and everyting else rests upon) has a crease down the center.This crease is very heavy and will distract from the finished model. This model has the potential to be detailed with 3-D figures, trees, shrubry from ground foam or lichen, and other items to make it very attractive. For the first time paper (sometimes called card) modeler this would be a nice place to start, even with the previously mentioned flaw
Book Description
The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum-buried during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, then rediscovered in 1750-contained a large collection of bronze and marble statuary and busts. Before they were published or exhibited, the sculptures were restored so as to appear whole: it is thus
that they helped to shape early modern tastes in classical sculpture.
The book describes the nature of the ancient sculptures and their impact on the modern public. Their chance discovery affected the interpretation of the statues-their styles and subjects-over the course of the next 250 years. The ancient sculptures were copied extensively in reproductions of various
sizes and patinas. The author traces the popularity of these copies in Europe and America.
Also presented in the book is a technical study of the production techniques and materials of the sculptures, as well as of their modern restoration history. Scientific analyses and detailed photographs reveal both how the pieces were cast and pieced together in antiquity and how they were restored
in the eighteenth century. Even though this collection has been known for two and a half centuries, this book covers for the first time the eclectic nature of the sculptures, their acutual condition, and their quality, pointing in some cases to mass production.
Average customer rating:
- Best book on Rome & Hadrian's Villa in English
- not a novel
- As good as a vacation...
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Rome and a Villa
Eleanor Clark
Manufacturer: Zoland Books
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A Traveller in Rome
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The Seasons of Rome : A Journal
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The Oysters of Locmariaquer (P.S.)
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The Smiles of Rome: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers
ASIN: 1883642515
Release Date: 2000-02-05 |
Book Description
IN 1947 A YOUNG AMERICAN woman named Eleanor Clark went to Rome on a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel. But Rome had its way with her, the novel was abandoned, and what followed was not a novel but a series of sketches of Roman life written mostly between 1948 and 1951. This new edition of the essential classic Rome and a Villa includes an evocative introduction by the preeminent translator William Weaver, who was close friends with the author and often wandered the city with her during the years she was working on the book.
Once in Rome, the foreign writer or artist, over the course of weeks, months, or years, begins to lose ambition, to lose a sense of urgency, to lose even a sense of self. What once seemed all-consuming is swallowed up by Rome itself; by the pace of life, by the fatalism of the Roman people, to whom everything and nothing matters, by the sheer historic weight and scale of the place. Rome is life itself - messy, random, anarchic, comical one moment, tragic the next, and above all, seductive.
Clark pays special attention to Roman art and architecture. In the book's midsection she looks at Hadrian's Villa - an enormous, unfinished palace - as a meta-phor for the city itself: decaying, imperial, shabby, but capable of inducing an overwhelming dreaminess in its visitors. The book's final chapter, written for an updated edition in 1974, is a lovely portrait of the so-called Protestant cemetery where both Keats and Shelley are buried, along with other foreign notables.
Customer Reviews:
Best book on Rome & Hadrian's Villa in English.......2004-03-12
"You walk close to your dreams"--that's the first sentence of Eleanor Clark's chapter on the fountains of Rome. Her book is lyrical but informative, and for some readers, perhaps too heavy with information, but I have found it indispensible both while in Rome and later back in the US thinking about where I had been. Orignally published as separate articles in The New Yorker magazine, each chapter focuses on a particular subject. One of my favorites is the section on Protestant Cemetery (actually the cemetery of the non-Catholics), where Keats, Shelley, Gramsci and many other non-Catholic writers, politicians, diplomats, and artists are buried. This is not a typical guidebook, however, and anyone who buys it in order to get maps, pictures, and restaurant tips will be disappointed. Nevertheless, it is an excellent guide to the city--it is thoughtful, it is full of strong opinions, and it is sometimes very funny, too. Eleanor Clark was married to the writer Robert Penn Warren, whose career overshadowed hers. Those who know his work but do not know the work of Clark may be surprised to find out just how good she is.
not a novel.......2002-03-28
this book is deceiving...i admit, some will find it interesting, but clark jumps around with no transitions. it is more of a journal, or a collection of essays. she does describe in detail a number of things in rome, yet if you are looking for a novel or a piece of literature which is cohesive this is not the book for you.
As good as a vacation..........2000-05-07
If you need to escape from the drudgery of your everyday life for awhile than this is the book for you.
Clark's masterpiece is as good as a month in the country. And not just any country either. All of Italy is opened to you by the mind and imagination of Eleanor Clark. She covers the territory from the haunted villa of Hadrian to the dangerous hills of Sicily and the cool depths of Saint Peter's Cathedral. You will meet with the ghost of the Emperor himself, a modern gangster cum matinee idol and the pilgrims of a Papal Jubilee.
Clark's prose is a whirlwind that leaves you breathless. She throws off sparks in all directions like a Catherine's Wheel. You won't "get" all of this book on the first go round but it is well worth a second and a third reading.
Average customer rating:
- An outstanding architectural history of the "good life"
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The Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity
Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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The Houses of Roman Italy, 100 B.C.-A.D. 250: Ritual, Space, and Decoration
ASIN: 0226173003 |
Book Description
Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey traces the influence of Pliny the Younger as a continuous theme throughout the history of architecture. First he looks at what Pliny considered to be the essential qualities of a villa. He then discusses the many buildings Pliny inspired: from the Renaissance estates of the Medici, to papal summer residences near Rome, to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and the home of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Equally important to du Prey's study are the many designs by architects past and present that remain on paper. These imaginary restitutions of Pliny's villas, each representative of its own epoch, trace in microcosm the evolution of the classical tradition in domestic architecture. In analyzing each project, du Prey illuminates the work of such great masters as Michelozzo, Raphael, Palladio, and Schinkel, as well as such well-known modern architects as Léon Krier, Jean-Pierre Adam, and Thomas Gordon Smith.
Customer Reviews:
An outstanding architectural history of the "good life".......1996-05-23
Rarely, perhaps once in a generation, does an enterprising scholar step forth with a truly novel research idea and the capacity to see it through. Du Prey's Villas of Pliny is just this: an utterly fascinating, deliciously composed, and copiously illustrated treatment of a neglected theme in architectural history. Although it is the authors object to document the perennial allure for post-medieval architects of Pliny the Youngers literary picture of villa life in ancient Rome, the books overall theme could be equally understood as the enduring architectural potency of one mans idea of the good life. Du Prey succeeds triumphantly both in the close compass of the historians exercise and in broader quality-of-life issues.
The book opens with a leisurely literary examination of Plinys Como letters and proceeds to articulate the four cardinal points of a villa described in the epistles to Gallus (bk. 2, ep. 17) and Apollinaris (bk. 5, ep. 6). Judiciously, Du Prey furnishes translations of these missives as appendices; the translation upon which he relies is John Boyles unsurpassed mid-eighteenth century text. After setting forth some of the basic themes that unite various projects across the centuries, the author proceeds through a historical sequence of reconstruction exercises and built designs each determined by a conscious reflection upon Plinys descriptions of his Laurentine and Tuscan villas. From the Medicis documented interest through various ruins and restitutions and emulations, Du Prey offers the reader an engaging tour through one of the most imaginatively fertile corridors of architectural history.
Although some of this material will be familiar to readers of James S. Ackermans recent study , Du Preys fidelity to the literary exigencies of his topic keeps him from wandering back to familiar stylistic comparisons with survey material. In fact, it is Du Preys tenacity in seeking out new imagery that keeps one eagerly turning the pages to digest the projects of Francesco Lazzari, William Newton, Stanislas Potocki, Friedrich August Krubsacius, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Louis-Pierre Haudebourt, Jules-Frdric Bouchet, and Hubert Stier. Not only has Du Prey expanded our understanding of historically well-established figures like Palladio and Flibien, he has also tilled the fields of relatively obscure talents to great advantage. The author dedicates the majority of one closing chapter to detailed discussions of several designs for a 1982 exhibition and colloquium in Paris; this amounts to a sustained essay in architectural criticism, and many readers will agree that, compared to his historical labors, this section constitutes the least successful portion of the book. Nevertheless, one hopes this study will generate an increased awareness of the significance of the Pliny theme and that other treatments such as Constantin Lipsiuss 1889 project in the archive of Dresdens Academy of Fine Arts will find their way into future editions.
The opportunity to survey such a rich thematic vein as Plinys legacy invites one to make new connections and associations. One such thought isThe Villas of Pliny should be regarded as a signal contribution to a growing awareness that, in terms of the History of Ideas, the overall continuity of much of nineteenth century art and architectural theory with what has been called the RenaissanceBaroque system is more in evidence than ever before. In other words, while generations of scholars have tended to locate the formal sources of modernity in the late-eighteenth century , the strands linking nineteenth-century ideas about art and creativity to much earlier periods are increasingly difficult to deny. Although such a perspective tends to attenuate the rupture of the High Modernism of the 1920s, the conceptual lineaments of historicism are perhaps better served.
Regardless of the books manifold historiographic value, its significance as a stirring, unforgettable read is impossible to deny.
[This review originally appeared in The New Criterion.]
Book Description
Roman Art in the Private Sphere presents an impressive case for the social and art historical importance of the paintings, mosaics, and sculptures that filled the private houses of the Roman elite. The six essays in this volume range from the first century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E., and from the Italian peninsula to the Eastern Empire and North African provinces.
The essays treat works of art that belonged to every major Roman housing type: the single-family atrium houses and the insula apartment blocks in Italian cities, the dramatically sited villas of the Campanian coast and countryside, and the palatial mansions of late antique provincial aristocrats.
In a complementary fashion the essays consider domestic art in relation to questions of decorum, status, wealth, social privilege, and obligation. Patrons emerge as actively interested in the character of their surroundings; artists appear as responsive to the desire of their patrons. The evidence in private art of homosexual conduct in high society is also set forth.
Originality of subject matter, sophisticated appreciation of stylistic and compositional nuance, and philosophical perceptions of the relationship of humanity and nature are among the themes that the essays explore. Together they demonstrate that Roman domestic art must be viewed on its own terms.
"This is a stimulating book and should be compulsory reading for all students of Roman art."--Classical Review
"For all the authors, attention to the ensemble, a sense of the relation between the formal and the iconographic, and the desire to historicize their material contribute to making this anthology unusual in its rigorous and creative attention to the way that art and architecture participate in the construction of the image of the Roman elite." --Art Bulletin
Elaine K. Gazda is Director of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan and Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology in the Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan.
Product Description
Many fine photographs and historical background of (among others) The Vatican, The Sistine Chapel, Tivoli, Villa D'Este and Villa Adriana.
Book Description
In a thriller of astounding menace and power, the acclaimed author of A Season for the Dead returns to the landscape he has made his own–the seething landscape of modern-day Rome–where ancient crimes lie hidden beneath colorful, bustling avenues. Here a teenage girl has disappeared, a detective is exploring a 2000-year-old ritual–and an astonishing mystery is about to unravel in a city of secrets and rage….
The Villa of Mysteries
In Rome’s crowded Campo dei Fiori, a woman rushes up to two carabinieri lounging in their sunglasses and uniforms, insisting that her sixteen-year-old daughter has just been abducted. Detective Nic Costa sees the scene unfold and intervenes. Because Costa knows what the two officers don’t: that in the morgue at Rome’s police headquarters, a forensic pathologist is examining the strange, mummified corpse of another
girl, whose disappearance and death bear haunting similarities….
Police pathologist Teresa Lupo is Nic’s colleague, friend, and his only equal when it comes to breaking the rules to get results, whatever the cost. Now, after years of living with the dead, Teresa insists that her superiors move quickly to save a life. Poring over the body of the girl in the morgue, she has found too many similarities between the girls, including a unique, leering tattoo. Lupo is sure that the vanished girl is headed for a bizarre ancient Bacchanalia involving virgins and sacrificial murder–a ritual that is only days away.
As Nic and Teresa claw at the case from two sides–and as Nic finds himself at once puzzled and beguiled by the missing girl’s seductive mother–a chilling picture is beginning to emerge…of secret relationships and sexual depravity, organized crime and unimaginable corruption. With the clock ticking down on a young girl’s life, Nic and Teresa are about to make the most horrifying discovery of all–in a pit of human darkness, where an age-old malevolence still endures, evil has consumed innocence…and a very modern vengeance has begun.
A spellbinding mix of suspense, forensic science, and human drama, The Villa of Mysteries will catch you off guard at every turn–a novel that is at once heartbreaking and impossible to put down.
Customer Reviews:
Creepy Roman Rituals.......2006-07-09
The story is great - police and mother try to track down a missing daughter. The story behind her being missing is really creepy - an ancient Roman ritual that leaves nothing to the imagination. There are some very good twists in the novel, and some parts that I am still having trouble understanding (drug use toward the end). Overall, it was a good read.
Skip This One.......2005-04-25
Hewson's novel is a waste of good talent. He's clearly capable of more fluid writing and characterization than the jumbled, piecemeal story placed before us.
The story revolves around a cult of Dionysius that engages in sexual epicurianism and drug use. Things went awry at one of the parties years ago; and when the victim's body turns up in a Roman suburbian bog, the police are called in to investigate. The characters are predictable and trite, and the plot never seems to connect at all the appropriate points. The ending is a letdown, and I don't think I'll be following any of the future adventures of Nic Costa, et al.
Disjointed, but good........2005-04-10
Although there's an interesting ensemble cast and the background of ancient and modern Rome, I found the story a bit disjointed, in part because you have Italians written by an Englishman, sounding like Americans. But there is good suspense and several very good twists.
wonderfully plotted mystery.......2005-03-30
As a reader of many, many mysteries, I'm not easily taken
in and caught up by plots any more, but this book is the
exception to the rule. I loved the setting (Rome), the
characters, and most of all the surprises that continued to
catch me off guard. This is my first Hewson mystery, and I
am looking forward to reading "Season of the Dead" very
soon.
Slow and Hard to Read.......2005-03-04
I read the last book with these characters and enjoyed it mostly so I thought I'd give this book a try. What a mistake. The plot was just too out there to follow, the characters are poorly defined (i.e., the all "sound" the same so it's hard to determine who is speaking), and the drug use didn't seem to have any purpose at all. Additionally, the book just didn't seem to flow well when read. Too many thoughts left out perhaps.
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The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum
