Italy and the Eternal City: Rome in History, Memory, and Imagination

Caput Mundi, Città Eterna, Theatrum Mundi: Rome as the Head of the World, the Eternal City, the stage upon which the world’s drama was set. These aphorisms speak not only to the centrality of Rome across European and even world history, but to the perennial pretention of the Eternal City to signify far more than its mere self: to be a holy city, a world-historical city, the fountainhead of Western or at least of Italic culture. This latest thematic issue of California Italian Studies, entitled “Italy and the Eternal City: Rome in History, Memory, and Imagination,” explores how the city and its representations have been continually shaped and reshaped over the centuries by a conviction that the indispensable significance of Rome extends beyond its local time and space, as well as by the time-honored habit of perceiving the city as a layered palimpsest of past Romes, all somehow vital and available in the present.