Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide (Oxford Archaeological Guides)

While the text is a bit dry and can, on occasion, be a chore to plow through, this is by far the most thorough and informative travel guide to Ancient Rome. Be aware, this is not your standard travel guide with info on where to eat and stay for the right price (still pick up a Let's Go or Lonely Planet). This is the book that will give you information on the sites, structures, and archaeological remains of the city. I bring it with me everytime I visit Rome. It's a must have for all scholastic travelers.

This Oxford archaeological guide to Rome is a replacement book for an older volume of the same that I had used so much that the pages were falling out! If you are primarily interested in the archaeological history of Rome from her beginnings through the late imperial period, then this is the book to have.

This guide is not a standard tour summary that just hits the highlights.
It is comprehensive and a bit academic, but if you really want to dig a little deeper into ancient Rome's structural past whether you are reading excerpts from it in your living room, or contemplating the forum from the Capitoline hill, this is the volume to have!

I took this book, along with a plethora of touristy guidebooks, and this one got read the most! We spent hours and hours in the Forum and the Palatine, and really delighted in uncovering the mysteries of so many building foundations. I left Rome wishing I had an archaeologist as a personal tour guide, but this book was an excellent substitution! It can be read at home, but I found infinitely more meaning when I sat at the site and read about where I was. Take this to Rome if you are interested in the ancients!

I had the fortune or misfortune of buying this book prior to my first visit to Rome. It is such a well-organized, well-written, and concise guide to ancient Rome that you could make the mistake that I made upon completing it and my first visits there. You might search a long, long time and spend a lot of money trying to find something better. Based upon my experience, a university-level seminar or a three semester hour course is the only thing that could surpass this guide.

Don't be put off by simplified plans shown in the pages. You need clear, simple ideas of what the stuff once was to understand what you're looking at. When you're in the ruins, you will be surrounded by other tourists, any changing weather conditions, and you will be viewing the architectural remains of a previous civilization from many different standpoints. You can't do that successfully without a clear, simple concept already in your mind.

Fodor's Holy Rome, 1st Edition: A Millennium Guide to Christian Sights (Fodor's Holy Rome)

You can't really understand Rome without this companion. It looks deeply into the very heart of the city, into its foundations and the stories they tell. This is practical archaelology at its best, presenting us with the lessons that history can teach us.