Focusing on images and descriptions of movement and spectacle-everyday street activities, congregations in market piazzas, life in the Jewish ghetto and the plague hospital, papal and other ceremonial processions, public punishment, and pilgrimage routes-Rose Marie San Juan uncovers the social tensions and conflicts within seventeenth-century Roman society that are both concealed within and prompted by mass-produced representations of the city. These depictions of Rome-guidebooks, street posters, broadsheets and brochures, topographic and thematic maps, city views, and collectible images of landmarks and other famous sights-redefined the ways in which public space was experienced, controlled, and utilized, encouraging tourists, pilgrims, and penitents while constraining the activities and movements of women, merchants, dissidents, and Jews.

San Juan contends that the representations of urban space afforded by new print technologies were appropriated by a wide variety of people in the city for purposes that ranged from regulation to opposition. A sophisticated analysis of the contested relations between people, print culture, and urban modernity, Rome: A City Out of Print also offers a rich portrait of the life of the street and the city.

In the wake of Europe’s print revolution, early seventeenth-century Rome witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of printed images and descriptive literature about the city. Consisting of guidebooks, street posters, broadsheets and brochures, topographic and thematic maps, city views, and collectible images depicting landmarks and other famous sights, this rich print culture variously portrayed Rome as orderly, changeable, progressive, even unpredictable. Through innovative interpretations of these often overlooked primary sources, Rome: A City Out of Print explores the gulf between representations of urban space in Rome and the realities of urban life.