COMING SOON

On the Street of the Hidden Shops: One City Block, Two Thousand Years, and a Walk through the Layered Lives of Rome University of Chicago Press, fall 2026

Rome is a city where history reveals itself in a continuous peeling back of layers, whether in the underbellies of its structures, in archaeological sites, or in museums. The most remarkable of these is the Crypta-Balbi Museum, which occupies a large part of a block in the center of the city.

One winter day, after visiting the museum, I took a stroll around the block. I passed the usual Roman stew of museum, church, palace, historic marker, decay, and debris, but was struck this time by the broad range of stories they presented. I found testaments to the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the abduction of young Ester Mieli by the Nazis; I watched an unhoused man build a shelter in the doorway of a decommissioned church, a few feet away from a poster protesting the dumping of garbage on the streets; I saw spaces occupied by Polish pilgrims and by hip tourists on e-bikes.

I knew that this same block had housed ancient glassworkers and rope makers, the daughters of prostitutes and other marginalized women, and an 2nd -century latrine. I learned that it had also been a target of fascist city planning and the center of a debate over urban renewal strategies in the 1960s. Many Italians associate the block with the Communist party, and some writers link it to an avant-garde literary journal, Botteghe oscure.

In fact, this block fronts the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, or the “Street of the Hidden Shops,” named for the medieval shops that were set up in the ruined foundations of the Crypta-Balbi theater, built in 13 BCE. The name is apt for a book that seeks to uncover stories that have been forgotten behind and beneath the stones of Rome.

Thank you to the New York Public Library for supporting me and my work through the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities, and to Karen Gantz Literary Management.