Rome Is Love Spelled Backward: Enjoying Art And Architecture In The Eternal City

A celebration of the art, architecture, and timeless human passion of the Eternal City, "Rome is Love Spelled Backward" explores Rome's best-known treasures. With the ancient play on "Roma" and "Amor", Testa invites readers to experience the world's long love affair with one of its most romantic cities. Photos.

Rome No other city has stirred such deep emotions nor drawn so many travelers to it. Its monuments blend the ancient grandeur of the Caesars with the romance of Bernini's fountains and the unsurpassed tenderness of Michelangelo's Pieta. An ever-changing kaleidoscope that transports its visitors from the ancient to the modern world with the turning of each street, Rome personifies the story of civilization as we have known it in the West for more than two thousand years.

Rome Is Love Spelled Backward is a new and engaging guide to the art, architecture, and timeless human passion of the Eternal City. Unlike conventional guidebooks, it focuses on the merging of art and ambition that makes Roman culture so vibrant. Famous and forgotten monuments play a role in Testa's account, as do the artists and patrons who brought them into being. Here readers can turn back layers of time to discover a living city that has no equal.

Often surprising readers with fascinating observations, Testa's first chapters concentrate on the people, art, and architecture of Imperial Rome. She then explores the legacy of early Christian and medieval Rome, before moving on to reveal how Michelangelo, Bernini, Caravaggio, and Borromini shaped the brilliant art of the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Whether exploring the Colosseum and the Jewish Catacombs, discovering the charmingly eccentric Quartiere Coppede, or reminding readers not to forget the more recent monuments to the victims of the city's Nazi occupation, Testa writes with an eye for the unusual. For her, the ancient wordplay on "Roma" and "amor" -- ROMAMOR -- holds the key to unraveling some of the most fascinating cultural puzzles readers are likelyever to encounter. Rome Is Love Spelled Backward is sure to enthrall casual and dedicated travelers alike with its fresh and stimulating insights.