Rome’s communal archives perished in the sack of 1527. Except for churches, the medieval city has mostly vanished, with little remaining to evoke Rome’s communal period (1143–1398), which for many cities of Northern and Central Italy was a glorious era. One result of this loss has been the stubbornly entrenched view of medieval Rome as little more than a wasteland, with idle Romans huddled in the bend of the Tiber, eking out an existence within the walls of a once-magnificent city overrun with weeds, its ruins doomed to the lime kilns. Rome, too, was a commune manqué because the papacy never allowed Romans full autonomy that other Italian communes held. The city’s historical importance seemed little more than a stage for the political drama of pope and emperor.

Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur’s superb study (French title, L’autre Rome: Une histoire des Romains à l’époque des communes [XIIe–XIVe siècle] [2010]) lays these fictions to rest. Drawing on his impressive research on Rome and on contributions from eminent historians of medieval Rome, such as Maria Andaloro, Serena Romano, Sandro Carocci, Richard Krautheimer, Massimo Miglio, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, he produces a synthesis of first-rate scholarship and a probing analysis of surviving, scattered source materials, such as notarial records, wills, church charters, and archaeological remains. Approaching communal Rome as an Annales historian, he lays out the economic and social structures as the essential condition for understanding the history of the city as a whole. Each chapter, as it were, adds layers of rich detail to his portrait of communal life: we catch the extensive physical, economic, and social vitality in the forest of towers (some 200–300), which were the mainstay of the baronial compounds; the spectacular expansion of casali (the indigenous agricultural enterprises of various sizes that allowed Roman families ready access to grains, livestock, wine, vegetables, and fruits) in the Roman Campagna; and the flourishing economic enterprises like banking, merchants’ commercial networks throughout Italy and Europe, and fish and meat production. As a society, Rome’s commune, in fact, appears astonishingly similar to other rival Italian communities but for a few significant inflections.

Like other communes, the commune of Rome embraced two major social groups: the people (il popolo) and the city nobility (nobiles viri), who possessed wealth, provided protection as mounted soldiers (milites), and were crucial in 1143 in declaring independence from the pope and establishing the commune. Rome, too, and uniquely, had barons, a smaller group of powerful families that rose rapidly around the middle of the thirteenth century, who laid hold of vast territories (castra and casali) thanks to a family member elected pope, such as Benedetto Caetani (Boniface VIII). As the barons pulled away from the commune—often struggling against one another, like the Colonna and Orsini—the lesser nobility made common cause with the popolo (i.e., all the other socio-occupational groups). The commune, too, had a well-running, sophisticated government with elected officials and an efficient bureaucracy noted for its civic services, making it “one of the strongest and best organised communes in all Italy” (217). In this setting, Maire Vigueur traverses the milestones of medieval Rome: the city’s struggles with neighbors (Tivoli, Albano, Tuscolo, Viterbo), the renovatio senatus of 1143, the tribuneship of Cola di Rienzo, the radical turns his leadership took in invoking the imperial ideal and Rome’s special destiny, and the denouement leading to the surrender of the commune’s independence to the popes in 1398.

The author ends with a fresh perspective on the unique mentalité of Rome’s communal period (particularly before the popes’ departure for Avignon) in its appreciation of Rome’s ancient traditions; its embrace of artistic innovations in marble, mosaics, frescoes, and pavements; in the wondrous creativity of medieval Rome, as seen in the Romans’ love of color, polychromy, and ornamentation; in the appropriation of noble ruins to illustrate their prestige, “the best way of paying homage to the beauty and value of the ancient artistic patrimony” (334); and in the brilliance and legacies of its indigenous artists—Rusuti, Torriti, and Cavallini. In this richly detailed, comprehensive picture of communal Rome we welcome a work that restores the city’s historical significance while bringing the rich colors and contours of its medieval period back to life.