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In the late sixteenth century, mapmakers turned away from Bufalini’s timeless fusion as well as his ichnographic language in order to sift through the Roman palimpsest. Their desire to recreate the ancient city as a counterpoint to the modern resulted in a veritable subgenre of Rome-then-and-now imagery. The pervasive theme of paragone—or competitive comparison—runs through these works, which express a longing to see the past resurrected and brought into dialogue with the present. Pirro Ligorio’s dazzling map of Roma Antica (1561) was not a reconstruction of the ancient city per se, but rather a glorious, learned reinvention. Stefano Du Pérac’s Sciographia of 1574 took inspiration from Ligorio, but incorporated a new source: the ancient, shattered marble plan know as the Forma urbis Romae. Mario Cartaro’s pendant etchings (1576/1579) made the paragone explicit by pairing the ancient city with “new” Rome or Roma Nuova. All of these works reveal shifting perceptions of Rome’s venerable past and Renaissance renewal, as well as a growing sense of historical rupture. Publishers like Antonio Lafreri, who dominated Rome’s active print business in the mid-to-late 1500s, were eager to answer the growing demand for such images and for city portraits in general.

This chapter addresses two basic, yet fundamental questions: how does the study of space inform us about the nature of walking in Rome and how does movement through a space allow us to understand the construction, purpose, and meaning of that space? It proposes a new approach to the study of movement in the city of Rome by establishing an ‘archaeology of walking’, utilizing archaeological evidence and the Forma Urbis Romae (FUR) alongside the ancient texts, to identify different experiences of walking in the city of Rome and the nature as well as the atmosphere of Rome's streets, sidewalks, and portico complexes.

This chapter considers the causes behind the reshaping of Roman retail landscapes during the third and last of the retail revolutions; while the process began in the Flavian era, its full expression was more often realized during the urban building boom of the early second century BCE. A homogenization of form now characterized the Roman taberna, as evidenced through the more simplified structural layouts of what are now rows and rows of one- and two-room shops. We also see it in the regularization of shop-fronts as identified through their standardized, mass-produced threshold stones. This chapter questions how the increasingly standardized shop-fronts can be found in so many cities across the Roman world, yet not everywhere. It also considers the dichotomous nature of the evidence for tabernae from this period, which represents both economic prosperity (in their architectural construction) and decline (in their artifact assemblages).