Rome - Day One by Andrea Carandini

The origins of Rome have never really caught the public imagination in the same way as the our preconceptions of the imperial period. Not without reason have the ideas of decadent excesses and crumbling empire inspired a century of Hollywood feature films. You might suspect this was purely out of ignorance, since the founding of Rome is not exactly the first thing we think of or read about. Yet so besotted are we with the idea that the Romans were somehow a mirror image of ourselves, modern people dressed in toga's, that we fail to remember that the Romans sprang from a primitive origin. They really did start from scratch...

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