Eight Days in Rome with Giuseppe Vasi

This book entails the first complete English translation of Giuseppe Vasi’s Itinerario Istruttivo Diviso in Otto Giornate (1777). Unlike other guides to Rome written in the eighteenth century, Vasi’s was woven into a more extensive oeuvre dedicated to the documentation and visualization of the Eternal City. In the introduction, this book tells the dynamic story of Vasi’s comprehensive representation of Rome from part to whole that he pursued his entire professional career. Titled Eight Days in Rome with Giuseppe Vasi, the book follows the author, mapping his itinerary onto Giovanni Battista Nolli’s Nuova Pianta di Roma (1748). In addition, it provides contemporary photographs of the buildings and urban spaces he illustrates and describes in the text to provide modern readers with a better understanding of the evolution of the city’s urban environment. Finally, this project analyzes how historical travel literature such as Vasi’s can expand our present knowledge of a city’s evolution, and those who contributed to its development, including the female saints, matrons, artists, and architects often left out of the guidebook tradition and history in general.