Robert Hughes. Written by the late Australian art critic and writer Robert Hughes (1938-2012), this book offers a comprehensive history of Rome - as a city, an empire, and an origin of Western art and civilisation. It is also a personal journey for the author who reminisces about his first encounter with the Italian capital in 1959. Hughes then takes the reader back more than 2,000 years, documenting the city’s foundation and the formation of the Roman empire, before exploring the rise of early Christianity, the Crusades, the Renaissance, the rise and fall of Mussolini’s fascism, up to the present day. Described by The New York Times as "engrossing" and "passionately written", the book is on sale at the Almost Corner Bookshop in Trastevere for €15.90.