From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome as a city, as an empire, and as an origin of Western art and civilization.
Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountered as a hungry twenty-one-year-old fresh from Australia in 1959. From there, he goes back more than two thousand years to the city s foundation, one mired in mythologies and superstitions that would inform Rome s development for centuries. He explores in rich detail the formation of empire, the...