Seventeenth-century Rome is a well-studied city. We know about its great families, from whose ranks cardinals and popes were created — the Borghese, the Barberini, the Pamphili. We know about their patronage of the major artists who shaped the Baroque style, including Bernini, Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona. We know about their magnificent palaces and vast collections of priceless antiquities and works of art. Yet in her book Gusto for Things, Renata Ago opens our eyes to an entirely new aspect of the Eternal City in this period. She allows us a look into the world of the more ordinary people who lived their lives around these famous grandees — the widows, the painters, the lawyers, the minor noblemen. Specifically, she informs us about the objects that shaped and defined these people’s existence, the things they owned, made use of, enjoyed, and formed attachments to.

Gusto for Things is the translation into English of Ago’s book Gusto della cose, originally published in Italian in 2006. It is useful to have this translation (made with great care and affection for the subject), as Ago’s study has a relevance that far exceeds the limits of her topic. Her book presents a detailed analysis of a historical consumer market. Seventeenth-century Rome was a rich city, but, outside of painting, sculpture, and architecture, it did not have a strong tradition of local manufacture. Instead, this was a place manufacturers in other cities exported their wares to. It is important to gain an understanding of how the tastes of Roman consumers affected and were in their turn affected by what was produced elsewhere. Moreover, Ago tells us about the preferences of a large group of consumers who have historically been ignored, partly because most of the objects they possessed were not spectacular enough to survive the ages. Nonetheless, these people filled their houses not only with functional items, but also with artifacts that gave them pleasure and were meaningful to them. They followed the consumption model of the aristocrats, but in doing so set their own trends as well, creating, for instance, a market for inexpensive paintings of landscapes and architectural capriccios.

Ago introduces us to the entire panoply of things that characterized middle-class life in this era. She thus puts the objects we tend to consider as culturally significant — books and paintings — in a wider context. She also gives us many unexpected insights into the practice of daily existence. Who would have thought that in the center of wealth and culture that was Rome at this time most people owned only one pair of shoes? Or were not able to cook at home and lived on takeaways from the local osteria? That women’s clothing and jewelry that husbands purchased for their wives remained part of the husbands’ assets even if the wives had the exclusive privilege of their usage? That women owned more things than men even though their possessions were less expensive?

Ago’s main body of evidence is a large collection of inventories. Perhaps the only problem with her study is that she has organized the data from these inventories according to the categories of objects they describe, which leaves the reader with the feeling of not knowing enough about either the nature of the documents that are being investigated or the people they were made for. For example, we are only reminded in passing that inventories are often far-from-complete surveys of everything that a household contained. Ago frequently distinguishes between inventories of men and women, but if the inventories of men were ones made up when the male head of a family died, it is not self-evident that the contents of the document should be read as a list of male possessions. And one is left to wonder how the minor painter Raspantini — hardly a household name of art history — could have amassed such a large collection of objects. These are marginal criticisms, however, of a book that students of art history and material culture will no doubt keep mining for information for decades to come.