Mirabilia Urbis Romae

[5] While Benedict’s compilation is closely linked to the papacy, long the steward of Rome’s monuments and infrastructure, other versions from only a little later seem to come instead from the ambit of the Roman Senate, the key institution of the medieval commune then taking control of much of the city.

For the jubilee year of 1500, Roman printers stayed busy churning out editions in Latin, Italian, German, French, and Spanish.

While earlier editions had included fanciful accounts of ancient history and misidentifications of the subjects of portrait statuary, the knowledge accumulated by Renaissance humanists allowed for an increasingly grounded and realistic rendering of Rome’s past.

Although guides now included both ancient and Christian monuments, they stopped short of describing recent works of art and architecture.

Modern critical attention was first drawn to the different versions of Mirabilia Urbis Romae by the 19th-century archaeologist of Christian Rome, Giovanni Battista de Rossi.