Rome

For almost a thousand years, Rome held sway as the spiritual and artistic centre of the world. Hughes vividly recreates the ancient Rome of Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, Caligula, Cicero, Martial, and Virgil. With the artistic blossoming of the Renaissance, he casts his unwavering critical eye over the great works of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Brunelleschi, shedding new light on the Old Masters.

In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, when Rome's cultural predominance was assured, artists and tourists from all over Europe converged on the city. Hughes brilliantly analyses the defining works of Caravaggio, Velasquez, Rubens, and Bernini.

Hughes' Rome is a vibrant, contradictory, spectacular, and secretive place; a monument both to human glory and human error. In equal parts loving, iconoclastic, enraged, and wise, peopled with colourful figures and rich in unexpected details, Rome is an exhilarating journey through the story of one of the world's most glorious cities.