In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the ancient city as a lived space, and particularly on movement through urban spaces and on viewsheds — a development in part facilitated by digital technology, which now makes it possible to ‘walk through’ reconstructions of ancient cities and see how spaces interact. This exciting new volume focusing on movement through the city of Rome and the interaction between monuments and people is, therefore, at the forefront of a flourishing research agenda that emphasizes the dynamism and motion of the ancient city. The volume arose out of two workshops held at the Swedish and the Norwegian Institutes in Rome in May 2011 and June 2012, and brings together a wide variety of researchers from different disciplines and at different career stages, covering a broad chronological spread, from the Republic through to Late Antiquity. While there is a real diversity of papers, and some are inevitably more closely tied to the central theme of movement than others, the circulation of all articles to contributors has resulted in a genuinely collaborative production and a notably coherent volume.

Following a useful editorial introduction, the papers are organized around four central themes: élite movement; literary movement; processional movement; and movement and urban form. Élite movement begins with Östenberg's study of aristocratic escorted walks in Republican Rome, which were important modes of display, be it lictors escorting magistrates, clients escorting patrons and electoral candidates for office, or crowds accompanying returning generals. Westall considers foreign dignitaries in Republican Rome, while Brännstedt focuses on Livia, whose developing political position is reflected in her actual movement within Rome, culminating in the granting of a lictor to her as a priestess of the cult of Augustus, and, from a.d. 22, the privilege of travelling in a two-wheeled carpentum, drawing on precedents set by the Vestals. Hellström then explores the legacy of the Republican ideal that the political élite should walk slowly and with dignity within Rome. This ideal is still present in the Severan histories of Dio Cassius and Herodian, but is absent from fourth-century writers such as Ammianus Marcellinus, perhaps because of Rome's changing political position and monumental landscape, and the emergence of a new political ideal. This section closes with Undheim's analysis of aristocratic Christian virgins, who moved around Rome visiting martyr shrines and basilicas, despite the ideal of seclusion, but whose movements were highly regulated by the norms and social control of the theological authorities and the wider community.

The section on literary movement is primarily late Republican and Augustan in focus, and opens with Hammar's study of violence in the late Republic, although here movement is more in the sense of a narrative sequence of events than physical movement. Corbeill then takes the familiar Satire 1.9 of Horace, where the poet tries to rid himself of a hanger-on who ends up being dragged off to court, as a starting point to explore legally sanctioned self-help in Rome, highlighting the inequality of the legal system and the visibility of formal and informal justice in Republican Rome. Spencer's chapter considers Varro's tour of Rome (Lingua Latina 5.143, 145–68), while Sullivan provides a new analysis of the ‘urban tour’ poems of Virgil, Horace, Propertius and Ovid.

The next section focuses on processional movement both within and in and out of Rome. Iara, for example, considers religiously motivated movement between the urbs and the suburbium, while Lange focuses on Augustus' movements across the pomerium in triumphs and ‘triumph-like celebrations’, which marked his return to the city after 29 b.c. The final three papers here focus on the development of new patterns of movement in late antique and early medieval Rome, as Christian sites grew in importance. Dal Santo, for example, provides an evocative exploration of the ways in which Pope Damasus (a.d. 366–384) systematically mapped and monumentalized Christian martyr shrines in the catacombs, enhancing the sensory experience of a visit through the use of light and shade. Andrews explores the laetaniae Septiformes of Gregory I, processions in which seven groups classified by age, sex and ecclesiastical status gathered at designated churches throughout the city and processed to the Basilica of S. Maria Maggiore, an important development in the devotion to Mary in Rome. Finally, Mulyran considers the implications of the construction of a series of churches in Rome linked to events in St Lawrence's martyr narrative, which could potentially have formed a new devotional route.

The final section on movement and urban form opens with Laurence's analysis of movement shaped by theories of the spatial turn, emphasizing that the size of imperial Rome produced new concepts of space, limiting movement and locating people more in neighbourhoods or vici than we might expect in smaller towns. Malmberg's paper forms part of an ongoing project concerning the Tiber's impact on Rome, and provides a welcome new perspective on river traffic, suggesting that the differences in form between the northern and southern ports in the city reflect their different rôles in supplying the city, and consequently the different types of vessels that they were built to accommodate, be it codicariae from Ostia, or lighter crafts from the Tiber Valley. Finally, Touati explores the rôle of artistic depictions of movement on imperial monuments in shaping actual movement through the city, and Bjørnebye analyses the spatial organization of the cult of Mithras in Rome from the late second to the early fifth century, demonstrating that while the majority of mithraea most likely catered for local people in neighbourhoods, the three much larger mithraea at key nodes in the city probably welcomed a wider group of people.

Overall, the range of papers and topics within this coherent volume is impressive and should interest a similarly wide range of researchers, as well as providing useful material for undergraduate classes on subjects as diverse as Augustan poetry, late Republican politics, the supply of Rome and early Christian Rome.