What the Romans did for tourists

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When in Rome: 2000 Years of Roman Sightseeing

Matthew Sturgis

There are hundreds of books on Rome, but this one is more than a little different, and it provides a particularly interesting and helpful summary of an important aspect of the city and its cultural history. Rome has been a tourist destination for such a long time that an examination of the changing priorities of visitors provides a barometer of changing tastes, perceptions and values over the centuries. If you have already seen Rome, you should gain some interesting insights into your previous sightseeing activities (and if you haven’t, this will warn you just how selective your future guide book might be!)

In his preface, Sturgis explains what prompted his idea for the book. He first visited Rome in 1980, just before going to university. He took with him an old guidebook, a Baedecker, the standard intelligent person’s guide to Rome from some decades earlier. He found that it looked very superior to the more garish modern publications on offer, but it guided him towards an appreciation of quite different things. So when he entered the church of S. Luigi dei Francesi, he dutifully looked at what the Baedecker bid him to see, only to find that all the other tourists were heading straight for a set of frescoes that his Baedecker failed to mention at all – Caravaggio’s life of St Matthew, very much the highlight of any tourist visit to the church today.

Priorities and tastes in ightseeing have always been changing. Many monuments in Rome that were admired by the ancient Romans became neglected during the Dark Ages. Then visitors who came in the Renaissance period admired different things from their medieval counterparts. And so on.

For Sturgis, the term ‘sightseeing’ covers all types of visiting, from the serious scholar to the casual tourist. With only 280 pages in which to cover two millennia, he positively gallops through the centuries. In fact, it’s such a huge subject that he’s had to summarise a great deal, which is rather a pity. But heskilfully finds examples that illustrate each theme well, and he writes in a style that doesn’t overwhelm the reader, but provides considerable information in a very digestible form.

Rome is a city which has inspired quotes aplenty (the first part of the book’s title being no exception). Everyone in the western world knows Rome to some extent through films, books or songs. Today’s guidebooks expect the reader to be familiar with images from films such as Ben Hur and Roman Holiday, and televised Papal appearances on the Vatican balcony.

Sturgis is scholarly in that he has trawled through many scholarly sources, though this isn’t primary research, but a distillation of relevant information available in published sources, reviewed with fascinating comparisons and analyses (the book has no footnote or endnotes, but there’s a very helpful bibliography and index). Awide range of material is covered, from general views, cityscapes and architecture, to antique sculpture and paintings, and much more. One lesson learnt is that we are certain to miss things if we follow only what one guidebook tells us to see. 

The tone of the book is wonderfully upbeat, and Sturgis gives the impression of having enjoyed writing it. His spirit is somewhat reminiscent of Adam Hart-Davis’s television programme What the Romans did for us, itself derived from the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The photograph of Sturgis inside the back cover shows him standing in front of (real) ancient Roman architecture, grinning cheerfully in twenty-first century clothing as two (fake) Roman soldiers in kitsch period costume prod him with their swords. 

I hope Sturgis follows his Rome with other cities such as Florence or Paris, London or New York, Edinburgh or London. Which is perhaps the point to mention St Pancras, a name which means a railway station to most British people today, though Sturgis tells us that in the Dark Ages this second-century martyr of Rome was revered by Anglo-Saxon visitors.   

I have just one criticism of this book. Along with so many other publications today, the colour illustrations are excellent but the black-and-white photographs are of rather poor quality. In fact, the images of Michaelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel ceiling are truly murky and difficult to see properly. Publishers, please note.

This is a publication that will be of interest to both the reader who has already been to Rome, and to the armchair traveller who has yet to set eyes on the eternal city.

When in Rome: 2000 Years of Roman Sightseeing   by Matthew Sturgis is published by Frances Lincoln 2011.  280 pp.,  18 col / 124 mono illus. ISBN 978-0-7112-2782-8