Subtitle: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists
The classical world took advantage of the Pax Romana¹ to develop an enormous tourist circuit through cultural, religious, historic, and sensual locales. Perrottet and his girlfriend toured such ancient sites, reading the ancient travel reports before they went - and reporting ancient graffiti on the surviving monuments. One thread of the book is how similar the ancient crowded, annoying, middlebrow experience was to the modern one. I would have liked lots more of the quotations from the ancient authors.
A second thread, which has at least half the wordcount, is a typical humorous traveler's tale. Although good of its kind, the kind isn't rare.
A third thread runs through the pictures, but not the text. The Victorians rediscovered the same tourist routes, with even more appetite for classical precedent. Perrottet doesn't say much about them, but many of his pictures are, for instance, highly romantic Alma-Tadema paintings. He also uses stills from 1950s and 1960s movies (quite awful) and some of his own photographs (quite good; more at the book's website.)
Originally published as Route 66 A.D.
ISBN: 0-375-75639-6
¹ Pax Romana or Pax Romanum? Does one mean a peace of Roman character, and the other a peace for the Romans? Not the same thing, said the soldier to the local. Must look up.
So wrote clew in History (21st c.). | TrackBack