Download or read book Engineering the Eternal City written by Pamela O. Long and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the “engineering pope” Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before. This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many conflicts, failures, and successes that shaped the city, as decision-makers tried to control not only Rome’s structures and infrastructures but also the people who lived there. Taking up visual images of the city created during the same period—most importantly in maps and urban representations, this book shows how in a time before the development of modern professionalism and modern bureaucracies, there was far more wide-ranging conversation among people of various backgrounds on issues of engineering and infrastructure than there is in our own times. Physicians, civic leaders, jurists, cardinals, popes, and clerics engaged with painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and other practitioners as they discussed, argued, and completed the projects that remade Rome.
Download or read book The Eternal City written by Jessica Maier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most visited places in the world, Rome attracts millions of tourists each year to walk its storied streets and see famous sites like the Colosseum, St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Trevi Fountain. Yet this ancient city’s allure is due as much to its rich, unbroken history as to its extraordinary array of landmarks. Countless incarnations and eras merge in the Roman cityscape. With a history spanning nearly three millennia, no other place can quite match the resilience and reinventions of the aptly nicknamed Eternal City. In this unique and visually engaging book, Jessica Maier considers Rome through the eyes of mapmakers and artists who have managed to capture something of its essence over the centuries. Viewing the city as not one but ten “Romes,” she explores how the varying maps and art reflect each era’s key themes. Ranging from modest to magnificent, the images comprise singular aesthetic monuments like paintings and grand prints as well as more popular and practical items like mass-produced tourist plans, archaeological surveys, and digitizations. The most iconic and important images of the city appear alongside relatively obscure, unassuming items that have just as much to teach us about Rome’s past. Through 140 full-color images and thoughtful overviews of each era, Maier provides an accessible, comprehensive look at Rome’s many overlapping layers of history in this landmark volume. The first English-language book to tell Rome’s rich story through its maps, The Eternal City beautifully captures the past, present, and future of one of the most famous and enduring places on the planet.
Download or read book The Seven Hills of Rome written by Grant Heiken and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From humble beginnings, Rome became perhaps the greatest intercontinental power in the world. Why did this historic city become so much more influential than its neighbor, nearby Latium, which was peopled by more or less the same stock? Over the years, historians, political analysts, and sociologists have discussed this question ad infinitum, without considering one underlying factor that led to the rise of Rome--the geology now hidden by the modern city. This book demonstrates the important link between the history of Rome and its geologic setting in a lively, fact-filled narrative sure to interest geology and history buffs and travelers alike. The authors point out that Rome possessed many geographic advantages over surrounding areas: proximity to a major river with access to the sea, plateaus for protection, nearby sources of building materials, and most significantly, clean drinking water from springs in the Apennines. Even the resiliency of Rome's architecture and the stability of life on its hills are underscored by the city's geologic framework. If carried along with a good city map, this book will expand the understanding of travelers who explore the eternal city's streets. Chapters are arranged geographically, based on each of the seven hills, the Tiber floodplain, ancient creeks that dissected the plateau, and ridges that rise above the right bank. As an added bonus, the last chapter consists of three field trips around the center of Rome, which can be enjoyed on foot or by using public transportation.
Download or read book Rome Measured and Imagined written by Jessica Maier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the fifteenth century, Rome was a city in transitionparts ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan and Christianand as it emerged from its medieval decline through the return of papal power and the onset of the Renaissance, its portrayals in print transformed as well. Jessica Maier s book explores the history of the Roman city portrait genre during the rise of Renaissance print culture. She illustrates how the maps of this era helped to promote the city, to educate, and to facilitate armchair exploration and what they reveal about how the people of Rome viewed or otherwise imagined their city. She also advances our understanding of early modern cartography, which embodies a delicate, intentional balance between science and art. The text is beautifully illustrated with nearly 100 images of the genre, a dozen of them in color."
Download or read book The Eternal City written by Kathleen Graber and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber’s award-winning second collection of poetry brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.
Download or read book Openness Secrecy Authorship written by Pamela O. Long and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-04-30 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the book and intellectual property that includes military technology and military secrets. Winner of The Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas In today's world of intellectual property disputes, industrial espionage, and book signings by famous authors, one easily loses sight of the historical nature of the attribution and ownership of texts. In Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Pamela Long combines intellectual history with the history of science and technology to explore the culture of authorship. Using classical Greek as well as medieval and Renaissance European examples, Long traces the definitions, limitations, and traditions of intellectual and scientific creation and attribution. She examines these attitudes as they pertain to the technical and the practical. Although Long's study follows a chronological development, this is not merely a general work. Long is able to examine events and sources within their historical context and locale. By looking at Aristotelian ideas of Praxis, Techne, and Episteme. She explains the tension between craft and ideas, authors and producers. She discusses, with solid research and clear prose, the rise, wane, and resurgence of priority in the crediting and lionizing of authors. Long illuminates the creation and re-creation of ideas like "trade secrets," "plagiarism," "mechanical arts," and "scribal culture." Her historical study complicates prevailing assumptions while inviting a closer look at issues that define so much of our society and thought to this day. She argues that "a useful working definition of authorship permits a gradation of meaning between the poles of authority and originality," and guides us through the term's nuances with clarity rarely matched in a historical study.
Download or read book Trapped Under the Sea written by Neil Swidey and published by Crown. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.” In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death. An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the book—which Dennis Lehane calls "extraordinary" and compares with The Perfect Storm—is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe. Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel—behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible—lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice.
Download or read book A Companion to the City of Rome written by Claire Holleran and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 804 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the City of Rome presents a series of original essays from top experts that offer an authoritative and up-to-date overview of current research on the development of the city of Rome from its origins until circa AD 600. Offers a unique interdisciplinary, closely focused thematic approach and wide chronological scope making it an indispensible reference work on ancient Rome Includes several new developments on areas of research that are available in English for the first time Newly commissioned essays written by experts in a variety of related fields Original and up-to-date readings pertaining to the city of Rome on a wide variety of topics including Rome’s urban landscape, population, economy, civic life, and key events
Download or read book Technology and Society in the Medieval Centuries written by Pamela O. Long and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pamela Long considers the ways in which different medieval cultures, from the Byzantine empire to northern Europe, adopted and transformed technologies according to their own needs. Long introduces readers to recent scholarship and to some of the significant issues in the historiography of medieval technology.
Download or read book Rome written by Rabun M. Taylor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-07 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first urban history of Rome to span its entire three-thousand-year history. It examines the processes by which Rome's leaders have shaped its urban fabric by organizing space, planning infrastructure, designing ritual, controlling populations, and exploiting Rome's standing as a seat of global power and a religious capital.
Download or read book Siena written by Jane Tylus and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Siena: City of Secrets" is a charming, intimate portrait of this most secretive of cities, often overlooked by travelers to Italy. Part cultural history and intellectual memoir, part travelogue and guide book, Tylus writes with a novelist s flair, taking the reader on a quest of discovery through the well- and not-so-well-travelled roads and alleys of the ancient city. Today, Siena can appear on the surface standoffish, a bit static, and very old-fashioned, especially when compared to its larger, flashier cousins Roma and Firenze. But first impressions wear away as we learn from Tylus that Siena was, over the long view, an innovator among the cities of Italy: the first to pave its streets and main plaza (1298), the first to publicly fund its university (1321), the first to employ the promissory note (1720), the first to ban automobile traffic from its city center (1965), and much else. We also hear about Siena s great artistic and architectural past, hidden behind centuries of over painting and rebuilding, and about its resident apocryphal and not-so-apocryphal Saints. And about the distinctive characters of its different neighborhoods ( contrade ), exemplified in the highly competitive horserace that takes place annually in the city and that serves as both a dividing and a uniting force for the Sienese. Throughout we are guided by the assuring voice of a seasoned scholar with a gift for spinning a good story and with an eye for the telling detail, whether we are traveling Siena s modern highways or digging through ancient Etruscan tombs; or shadowing the path walked by medieval pilgrims; or tracking the city s financial history from its beginnings as the once-great center for commerce in the sixteenth century to its near collapse in January 2013; or celebrating literary giants Dante and Calvino or giants of the arena, Siena s Series A soccer team. A useful and entertaining guide for students of Italian culture (Tylus has written discursive, reader-friendly endnotes and included a full bibliography in the back matter), the book will also appeal to the traveler and tourist (virtual or otherwise) interested in learning more about this ancient, mysterious, reclusive citydespite itself."
Download or read book Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire written by Michael Kerrigan and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire tells the enthralling story of how an insignificant settlement came to be a pre-eminent metropolis, and how a tribe of impoverished shepherds came to rule the world. Having learned to fight for their very survival, the Romans were soon waging war as a way of life: before long, all of Italy was under their command. Across Western Europe, North Africa and the Near East, the legions carried Roman culture wherever they went, building roads and cities and establishing law and order. Yet alongside the civic dignity, the awesome engineering achievements and stunning works of art, a more sinister side of Roman culture could be seen in the arena at the Colosseum, where gladiators fought to the death. Whatever its flaws, the world the Romans built seemed strong and stable enough to last for ever: in the end, though, the eternal city would prove all too mortal. It was another unlikely race of shepherds - nomadic tribesmen far out on the Central Asian steppe - which set in motion the cataclysmic sequence of events that led to Rome's decline and fall. As this fascinating history shows, the legacy the Romans left behind them would live on to influence just about
Download or read book Gusto for Things written by Renata Ago and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a material world—our homes are filled with things, from electronics to curios and hand-me-downs, that disclose as much about us and our aspirations as they do about current trends. But we are not the first: the early modern period was a time of expanding consumption, when objects began to play an important role in defining gender as well as social status. Gusto for Things reconstructs the material lives of seventeenth-century Romans, exploring new ways of thinking about the meaning of things as a historical phenomenon. Through creative use of account books, inventories, wills, and other records, Renata Ago examines early modern attitudes toward possessions, asking what people did with their things, why they wrote about them, and how they passed objects on to their heirs. While some inhabitants of Rome were connoisseurs of the paintings, books, and curiosities that made the city famous, Ago shows that men and women of lesser means also filled their homes with a more modest array of goods. She also discovers the genealogies of certain categories of things—for instance, books went from being classed as luxury goods to a category all their own—and considers what that reveals about the early modern era. An animated investigation into the relationship between people and the things they buy, Gusto for Things paints an illuminating portrait of the meaning of objects in preindustrial Europe.
Download or read book Technology Society and Culture in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe 1300 1600 written by Pamela O. Long and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Roma Rome La Citta Eterna written by Michael M. Dediu and published by . This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roma, with its over 2,500 glorious years of history and beauty, is a place which occupies an incomparable place in our civilization. The over 170 photos, taken in October and December 2011, show a charming variety of images of the Forum Romanum, Amphitheatrum Flavium (Colosseum), Trajan's Column and of other splendid places from Rome. After reading this book, it will be very easy to understand why Rome is so full of history and beauty that the more you know about it, the more you love it. Millions of visitors who see Rome for a second time say that Rome looks, if anything, younger and newer; this is the reason why Roma is called La Citta Eterna - the Eternal City.
Download or read book Inside Out Back Again written by Thanhha Lai and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.
Download or read book The Scarith of Scornello written by Ingrid D. Rowland and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-12-31 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As recounted here by Ingrid D. Rowland, Curzio preyed on the Italian fixation with ancestry to forge an array of ancient Latin and Etruscan documents. For authenticity's sake, he stashed the counterfeit treasure in scarith (capsules made of hair and mud) near Scornello. To the seventeenth-century Tuscans who were so eager to establish proof of their heritage and history, the scarith symbolized a link to the prestigious culture of their past. But because none of these proud Italians could actually read the ancient Etruscan language, they couldn't know for certain that the documents were frauds. The Scarith of Scornello traces the career of this young scam artist whose "discoveries" reached the Vatican shortly after Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition, inspiring participants on both sides of the affair to clash again - this time over Etruscan history."--BOOK JACKET.
