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The Families Who Made Rome
The Families Who Made Rome
Nov 14, 2024 3:32 PM

Author:Anthony Majanlahti

The Families Who Made Rome

How often does a visitor to Rome drift towards some landmark and wonder who created it? Why? What was their story? This fascinating book provides the answers. At once a history and a guide, it divides Rome into the districts dominated by the fabulously rich families of the Popes: the Colonna, della Rovere, Farnese, Borghese, Barberini and others. In each case we learn their story - powerful, bloody and vivid - with all the scandals and intrigues as well as their relationships with artists like Bernini and Michelangelo.

As we stroll through Rome's history - either literally or in the imagination - we discover it afresh. Famous sites like the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps and St Peter's take on new significance as we watch the city rise from cramped medieval streets to become a glorious panorama of piazzas and palaces, fountains, towers and domes.

Reviews

[An] intriguing and original book...even the armchair tourist can benefit

—— Tim Blanning , Sunday Telegraph

Elegant and informative...an entertaining mix of travelogue and history...we flit agreeably through the chequered history of the papacy

—— Charles Nicholl , Sunday Times

Anthony Majanlahti wears his scholarship lightly and tempers his enthusiasm with humour; he has a thousand tales to tell... Enormously entertaining

—— Times Literary Supplement

Marvellous... For anyone interested in delving further into one of the world's most beautiful and extraordinary cities, this is essential reading

—— Tablet

Fascinating... A fine account of a decadent age and place

—— RA Magazine

This book demonstrates for the first time the true spread and depth of fascist beliefs- and the extent to which they were distinctly British

—— David Graham , Manchester Evening News

A fast-moving, well-researched and readable account of a dramatic slice of European history

—— Tablet

... This bright, engaging and breezy book ... suits the tenor of our times.

—— The Times

A remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness...an unfolding literary event

—— New York Times Book Review

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in 'drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust'

—— New York Times

A quiet triumph, moving and simple - impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics

—— Washington Post

All too infrequently, a book comes along that' s as daring as it is acclaimed. Art Spiegelman's Maus is just such a book

—— Esquire

A remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution... at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant

—— Jules Feiffer

Maus is a masterpiece, and it's in the nature of such things to generate mysteries, and pose more questions than they answer. But if the notion of a canon means anything, Maus is there at the heart of it. Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect

—— Philip Pullman

Spiegelman's Maus changed comics forever. Comics now can be about anything

—— Alison Bechdel

Reading [his work] has been an amazing lesson in storytelling

—— Etgar Keret

It can be easy to forget how much of a game-changer Maus was.

—— Washington Post
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