"The Ruins Lesson makes one point above all: there was no single dominant way of observing ancient ruins and portraying what remained. Jessica Maier’s The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps provides a rich complementary account. . . . For centuries, as she shows, mapmakers and miniaturists, antiquarians and cartographers set out to do exactly what he thought impossible: to represent at least in part not only the city of Rome, but some of the ways in which it had changed over time."

London Review of Books

“No other city has maintained the story of its past in its present quite like Rome, creating an intentional palimpsest through incessant acts of preservation, reconstruction, and cartographic visualization. Maier’s lively, imaginatively organized, and accessible book displays how centuries of maps not only tell stories about the city’s physical development but also show how Rome’s narratives of itself—conflating eras, resituating buildings, compressing waterways—unfurled in self-mapping from antiquity to the Metro.”

Evelyn Lincoln, Brown University

“The history of Rome comes to life in this erudite, beautifully written book. Organized chronologically from Rome’s early beginnings to the present, this richly detailed history of Rome is focused through the lens of maps and cartographic images. Maier has written a fascinating account for both armchair and actual travelers. The Eternal City also has much to offer to seasoned scholars who will appreciate its coherent and fluid synthesis.”

Pamela O. Long, author of Engineering the Eternal City

“The Eternal City offers the reader a vivid panorama of Rome’s changing form and image over the course of more than two millennia. A rich selection of city plans and views reveals crucial shifts in representational strategies, function, and symbolic intent. The dynamic tension between Rome’s complex, three-dimensional urban reality and the city’s image as projected by successive generations of artists and cartographers is certain to engage a wide audience.”

John Pinto, emeritus, Princeton University

"The Eternal City is a brilliant history of Rome, focusing on how we have responded to and represented this ever-changing city. Digging down into both Rome's history and our own desires for this city, Maier has written a fascinating book that has changed the way I consider maps and history."

A Universe in Words blog