Quid have we here? Nihil less than a smart parody of all the usual travel guides and one that manages to sustain its originality by delivering genuine, if often larky or unashamedly salacious, information about ancient Rome in a handy modern format. Provincial visitors, lugging their impedimenta up the Appian Way might have found it a useful vademecum while the Caesars were on the throne. Today’s 50-euro-a-day tourist will find it hardly less enlightening.
Philip Matyszak both knows his stuff and manages to serve it in deliciae-sized portions. His guide honours all the usual categories of sights and pleasures and alerts travellers to the perennial dangers, not forgetting mislaid or misappropriated luggage on the way in (how much more reliable is Rome airport today?). But doesn’t Matyszak exaggerate in saying that ancient ships’ captains were legally liable for the loss of their passengers’ stuff? The Rhodian rules of the sea, later adopted throughout the Med, stipulated that only valuables locked in the captain’s safe were his responsibility.
The text is crammed with good advice about food (highly spiced and gastronomically inventive, if you fancy stuffed dormouse, but you’ll find no pasta, it seems, in ancient Rome), social climbing, clothes — don’t wear brown wool, we are warned, unless you want to be taken for a slave — and lodging (avoid verminous clip-joints by staying with amici, si potes).
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