An unapologetically personal history of the city of Rome, R. J. B Bosworth's Whispering City: Modern Rome and its Histories focuses on the past two centuries of the city's story. But, like the city itself, earlier remains are always peeking through, being dusted off, and shaping what we see. The points of reference are material remnants of the past, and each chapter uses a monument, inscription, or other fragment of the physical city to situate the reader within the spatial and material Rome before departing to the textual and historical one. B. details the ways in which politicians, popes, and archaeologists created the modern Rome, and in so doing reveals the myriad ways they selectively revealed, restored, and rebuilt the city, leveraging the Classical and other pasts where it suited their purposes.

B.'s Rome is far more than a palimpsest, and he reveals many complex entanglements. Thus the turn of the century monument on the Janiculum to revolutionary hero Garibaldi has a date reckoned ab urbe condita and a later, nearby, monument to his first wife Anita was shaped by Mussolini's interventions, recast to fit with Fascist ideologies. The contested meanings and readings of Garibaldi's place in Roman history continued in the communist ‘Garibaldi brigades’ and into contemporary conflicts over his memory. B. demonstrates the ways that public monuments, like those of the Garibaldis and other characters of the Risorgimento in Rome, are themselves records of the disputed and changing views of the unification.

Classical Rome, again and again, proves to be among the most usable of pasts, mutable for use by papal, imperial, and national principles, as detailed in B.'s rich account. From the 1870s Lanciani promoted Roman archaeology, both at home and abroad, as a great remover of earth which could at once create a modern city and reveal an ancient one. The exhibition of the Fascist revolution, Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, constructed a vision of Italy under Roman domination that was a necessary myth for Mussolini's aims. Greeted with excited reviews in this journal at the time (e.g. E. Strong or R. Meiggs in JRS 29 (1939)), the Mostra situated the Duce as a third founder of Rome, in line with Augustus and Romulus. Selective archaeology and urban clearances isolated the Augustan Forum and other parts of Rome which fit with Mussolini's ideologies, as B. situates in context in his seventh and eighth chapters. Most students of the city will be familiar with the reworking of Augustus' Mausoleum and the Ara Pacis to create a ‘holy site of empire’, but it was not only in exhibitions or archaeology that the Classical past was marshalled: Virgil, too, was pressed into service with the bimillenary of his birth the excuse for constructing a new park, one of the many urban interventions of this transformative period for the city. Erasures were also a product of Mussolini's urban vision, in which there was no place for histories which did not fit into a totalitarian reading of the city's past. Later, such urban cleansing included making way for the 1960 Olympics at the expense of the urban poor in the area that would become the athlete's housing. Not all of Rome's peoples thought the city's Classical heritage was a useful one, but most engaged with it — even Futurists who in 1910 mockingly called for the bulldozing of the Classical remains, which they suggested could be buried in a coffin in the city. B. himself cannot resist a Classical parallel, for instance, comparing the terrorists of the 1970s to Cassius.

B. allows his Rome to be fantastically tangled, expertly skipping between periods and across the urban landscape. Beyond a typical tale of urban evolution, B. gives us a history of Rome, of deep antiquity and recent past, which is grounded in the hills, streets and monuments of the corporeal city.