One of the most celebrated art critics and cultural commentators turns his attention to the timelessly fascinating city of Rome. In this magisterial history, Robert Hughes identifies seven distinct cultural episodes: the city's Etruscan beginnings, Julius Caesar and the birth of the Imperium, primitive Christianity and the growth of the Church, the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Neo-Classic, the Rome of Fascism and Mussolini and, finally, the Rome of the 1960s - the era of Fellini, la dolce vita and the birth of the paparazzo.The founding of Rome is shrouded in legend, but current archaeological evidence supports the theory that Rome grew from pastoral settlements and coalesced into a city in the 8th century BC. It developed into the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and finally the Roman Empire. For almost a thousand years, Rome was the most politically important, richest and largest city in the Western world.
