Rome of the Caesars [antikvár]

FOREWORDAny attempt to reconstruct the Rome of the Caesars, to imagine how its great historical events took place and what its private and public life were like, is an arduous and fascinating undertaking, in a city which endured and was constantly renewed for more than fourteen centuries, despite wars and natural disasters, fires and works of reconstruction, enlargements and the disfigurements wrought by the hand of man. It is an undertaking which involves a painstaking process of mental integration, a process which, if one wishes to avoid escaping into pure fantasy, can only be based on the archeological ruins still in existence and on the evidence which has come down to us from the ancient writers: but in both cases with all the limitations and reserves imposed by the fact that only a small part of either has reached us intact. Such a work of reconstruction, moreover, already fragmentary and full of gaps in itself, is rendered more dijficult by the need to select, almost to extract, the scattered and corroded remains of the ancient city from among the living monuments and urban context of the papal and modern city, superimposed on the ancient one.This is why the tourist fascinated by the ancient world, from Petrarch to Goethe and from Byron to Gogol and Stendhal, has always needed months, even years, to penetrate and assimilate the mystery of ancient Rome, why a long stay in the city was considered a basic necessity in the Humanist culture.