On the Street of the Hidden Shops
One City Block, Two Thousand Years, and a Walk Through the Layered Lives of Rome
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On the Street of the Hidden Shops
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Letto da:
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Cassandra Campbell
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Di:
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Elizabeth Rodini
Delve into Rome’s lost history through the stories of a single city block.
Cutting through the heart of Rome is Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a time-worn street named for the mysterious “shops” said to run beneath it. History lies thick here, a museum atop a convent atop ancient ruins; layered in are traces of artisans and poets, pilgrims and saints, a Fascist deportation, a communist coffee bar, a political assassination, and shopkeepers, too. These stories all rest upon a single city block, the same place where, in 13 BCE, the triumphal Roman general Lucius Cornelius Balbus built a monumental theater complex in his own honor.
Elizabeth Rodini’s On the Street of the Hidden Shops digs deep into this corner of the city, uncovering a set of surprising, often poignant narratives that range across two thousand years. For as the walls of Balbus’s compound decayed and the neighborhood was rebuilt, this block would come to shelter Romans from all walks of life: the daughters of local prostitutes, an earnest young man in search of a bride, an entrepreneur determined to preserve the city’s colorful dialect, a Jewish family recently liberated from the nearby Ghetto, and a band of idealistic archaeologists unearthing a long-forgotten past, as well as a gifted baker, a medieval donkey, and a Renaissance ghost. Their stories survive in archives and artifacts but also in the enduring power of rumor and legend.
On the Street of the Hidden Shops invites us on a captivating journey to one place across many centuries. Its tight urban focus reveals a Rome most visitors miss, while uncovering some of the many Romes that have been largely lost to history.
©2026 University of Chicago Press (P)2026 University of Chicago PressRecensioni della critica
“It is easy enough to grasp that Rome is a city whose many layers reach back into the distant past. The difficult task is to make those layers come alive. Rodini has risen to this challenge. Through a rare combination of archival research and imaginative reconstruction, she has conjured up the lives of the inhabitants over the centuries of a single block. Her book is a triumph of close looking.”
— Stephen Greenblatt, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern"“In Rome, every afternoon, my school bus took me down Via delle Botteghe Oscure. The street was dark and mostly dull. Years later, I discovered the international literary magazine Botteghe Oscure, probably the best of its kind, ever. And then the street was famous for standing a block away from where Aldo Moro, Italy’s premier statesman, was found killed in a car. The street goes back to antiquity. As Freud once wrote, in Rome you do not encounter just ruins underground; you encounter ruins of subsequent ruins. This excellent book frees these subterranean passageways from oblivion.”
— André Aciman, author of "Call Me by Your Name," "Enigma Variations," "Roman Year," and more“This is a beautifully conceived and written book that encapsulates the complex layers of a Roman city block, allowing the reader to move seamlessly through space and time so as to experience its hidden histories and lives. It reveals both Rodini’s masterful research (archival, art historical, archaeological, anthropological) and her firsthand knowledge of this neighborhood and its people. The book captures the essence of Rome’s diversity and passionately marvels at the many activities that transpired on its blocks over a two-thousand-year period.”
— Lia Markey, director of the Center for Renaissance Studies, the Newberry Library