Gusto for Things

"Ago’s book is an important contribution to the field of seventeenth-century material culture in Rome and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, from art historians to economic historians, from anthropologists to social historians. . . . Like all pioneering books . . . Gusto for Things has the indisputable merit not only to answer questions but also to stimulate curiosity and new threads of research."

“A lively translation of the author’s 2006 book in Italian with the same title, Gusto for Things is a welcome addition to the growing number of studies that use material culture as a window to the past.”

“[A] tour-de-force study.”

“[A] meticulously researched book, the result of a fine-grained study of a large number of account books, inventories, wills, testaments, memoirs, correspondence, and other notarial records that document the interactions of Romans with a myriad of things.”
 

 “This superb translation of Renata Ago’s wonderful book gives the rented dresses and pawned rings, the silk flowers and porcelain cups of late Renaissance and baroque Rome a chance to tell their story—a story of men and women who acquired, used, exchanged, donated, and, above all, had feelings about the objects in their lives. This pathbreaking study looks at the development of an early modern consumer society in the only way that gives this history real texture—through the concrete materiality of things—things of increasing variety and quality distributed according to age-old hierarchies of wealth and gender but also innovative patterns of emerging ‘taste.’ By targeting a leading center of artistic production that was also somewhat marginal to new global trading networks, Ago sharpens our picture of the first capitalist age with all-important local nuance and vivacity.”