Vatican museums: Rome.

Roman political leaders used distance from Rome as a key political tool to assert pre-eminence. Through the case studies of Caesar’s hegemony, Augustus’s autocracy, and Tiberi...

Romans held that the Republican city was built almost instantly following the earlier city’s catastrophic destruction by Gauls in 390 BCE. Furthermore, the huge costs of rebuilding...

This chapter examines the development of the city commune in Rome during the period 1050–1150. Rome does not occupy a central place in accounts of early Italian city communes. The ...

Nigel Zimmermann presents critical reflections from leading Catholic prelates and scholars on the significance of the Second Vatican Council fifty years after it began. These inclu...

Despite the fact that the majority of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire lived an agricultural existence and thus resided outside of urban centers, there is no denying the fact th...

The Liber Pontificalis’s account of the four-day Synod of Rome in April 769 convened by Pope Stephen III is a remarkable scene of histrionic recrimination and the condemnation of S...

This chapter focuses on the creation of holy sites in Rome that are comparable in their significance to those in Jerusalem—that is, touched by past sacred events and/or sacred bodi...