Customer Reviews

Rome: The Biography of a City

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Hibbert presents Rome in a refreshing and vibrant light. Starting with the foundations of the city and the Romulus and Remus myth, and continuing through the days of empire, the barbarian onslaught, the rise of the church, the medieval era, and the city in more modern times, he links location, biography and history in a way that continually excites. Well illustrated, with maps, diagrams, paintings and photos, this book should be essential preparatory reading before visiting the Eternal City. (For a modern guide including information on restaurants, etc, to act as a good counterpart to this historical book, I recommend looking at Let's Go Rome. I used both these books on my two week trip in 1999, and didn't require any other references.)

I planned to visit Rome and was told Mr Hibbert's book was better than any travel guide. I was worried it would be a boring, textbook read. To my surprise, I was absolutely engrossed from cover to cover. The endnotes were a bit too inclusive for my taste, but for a true historian, the information would be captivating. Mr. Hibbert's focus on numerous Vatican events is eye opening.

This is a good book for those interested in learning about general Rome History but not necessarily in reading thick textbooks. If you're interested in learning about specific periods/events (or the Roman Empire as a whole), you might want to look elsewhere. If you're interested in reading about a great city as a whole, this is a solid choice.

In Self-Reliance, Emerson says, "In history our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate are gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same," (130). This is a good place to begin articulating my discomfort with Hibbert's Rome: The Biography of a City. Halfway through the book one still has not seen any of Emerson's view that history is more than a succession of popes and kings. On the contrary, Hibbert seems to think that history is only that. It is an older book, and so we spare it some of our modern politics, but thus far, I've read nothing of women, nothing even of artists or architects in a city renowned for these, only that this king fought with this pope etc. through the centuries. I thought historians somehow knew better. One possible explanation for Hibbert's lack of attention to the actual soul of Rome is that he casts a broad net, writing so many histories he can hardly have time to do anything like justice to a place. He's written about France, Britain, America, and India, about their revolutions and separate books about their major figures, lending the impression that he may approach theses "biographies" like assembly-line machinery. One last neglect which seems to me not only in bad taste, but odd: Hibbert's Rome has been pretty overt in its dismissal of the Catholic Church. Nothing has been said about its many acts of charity, nor of its social/art educational status in the community, nor about the individual faiths of the saints and pilgrims, whose devotion, in the face of such obvious abuses, I find heartening.

I found the book to be well written and engaging in that typical British anecdotal style that breathes life into historical characters. It offers a detailed account of the sometimes bizarre history of this magnificent city during more than two millennia, all in one book, up until the middle of the 20th century.

However, I felt that the book was quite lacking in providing answers, or even clues to answers, to the Big Questions: the rise and fall of the Republic and the later Empire, and the rise of Christianity. I did miss the context of all these facts that streamed by page after page, and there was no scholarly interpretation from the learned author regarding these inevitable Big Questions.

The latter part of the book gets even better, when the author seems more at ease dealing with the 19th and 20th century. I found the detailed portrait of the rise and fall of the fascist state headed by Mussolini especially riveting. But even there, I wanted a bit more background and historical interpretation.

If you look for a book that introduces you to more than two thousand years of Roman history, and is both educating and reads more like a novel than a thesis, you will not be disappointed. Furthermore, the book includes maps and pictures, to be used during a stay in the Eternal City. But if you want a more intellectual interpretation, there are better books on offer. I decided to buy both.

With a book that covers over 2,500 years of history, don't expect in-depth coverage here. That's not what this book is about. It provides a very good, bird's-eye view of the city and its history, however, and does a good job of impressing on the reader the incredible continuity of the city's history. I think there's a tendency to concentrate on ancient Rome and then to jump a thousand years to the Renaissance and the Baroque, without focusing on the incredible medieval history of the city. I found the chapters of the book devoted to the medieval period to be some of the more interesting.

The author of "Rome, the Biography of a City," is not Alberto Pisa; it's Christopher Hibbert! I'm sure that the author of this excellent book would NOT appreciate seeing it attributed to someone else.

I'm headed to Rome soon and was looking for a book that would provide some history as well as be a decent guidebook. This book was billed as precisely that. However, I was annoyed that the author seemed to go out of his way to scorn the papacy and almost universally presented the Popes and the Church of Rome in a negative light. As a Catholic, I found this tendency annoying and distracting from the book's true purpose. I wouldn't recommend it as either a history or a guide book.