Lire la Ville. Fragments d'une archéologie littéraire de Rome antique

Literary works often provide information about urban topographies and their monuments and their histories. This characteristic of texts has led to the application of many different approaches. From among these, the scholars who met at a conference in Geneva in 2010 deliberately attempted to avoid both literary topography and “topographic” literature and so go beyond the traditional use of texts as sources for the reconstruction of the places mentioned by ancient authors. The aim in doing so was to draw on the potential offered by concepts such as landscapes of memory and to investigate the relationship between physical realities and textual fictionality. Two main strategies came to the fore: the first sought mainly to combine rhetoric, history and topographical realities of the Roman Republic; the second attempted to focus on memories of origins and the creation of imagined places, with a special focus on the poetry of the early Empire.