The publication of these two books underlines the revival of the study of Roman urbanism in Italy, although this currently hot topic never really disappeared. The backbone of the books is to be found in the academic environment of the University of Cambridge under the direction of Martin Millett, where British landscape tradition meets Italian classical archaeology. The topographical method, or topografia antica, is perhaps less known to those working outside Italian archaeology, but it is relevant to anyone undertaking research in the various corners of the Roman Empire and to a broader range of potential readers of these two excellent contributions.

Both these books aim to renew the field of research by bringing together new topics, methods, and ideas to broaden the study of Roman cities. Their most important contribution is that they offer new insights into the latest understanding of the Roman city and its history, as well as anthropology and sociology, which is particularly emphasized by Dunia Filippi and her selection of texts. Filippi's book follows up on debates started by Luuk Light and John Bintliff's volume on regional urban systems (Reference Light and Bintliff2019) or in ‘Archaeological Survey and the City’ edited by Paul Johnson and Martin Millet (Reference Johnson and Millett2013), and the recent issue of Archeologia Aerea (Ceraudo, et al. Reference Ceraudo, Ferrari and Scardozzi2023), dedicated to ‘Le Città invisibili, Metodologie non-invasive per lo studio della città antica’ (‘The invisible city, Non-invasive methodologies for the study of the ancient city’). These earlier publications, in which methodology is a crucial element, primarily address a critical issue of both Alessandro Launaro's and Dunia Filippi's books, namely the role of geophysical techniques as one of the leading technological advances for the documentation and interpretation of urban plans.

Beginning with an analysis of Filippi's ‘Rethinking the Roman City’, it quickly becomes clear, thanks to a well-written introduction, that the volume stems from the author's Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, that took shape in a Roman Archaeology Conference (RAC) in Rome and a specially dedicated workshop. One of the main aims and achievements of the volume is to transcend national academic boundaries and provide a comprehensive insight into research on Roman urbanism in Italy. It should be acknowledged that the academic traditions of research in Italy are not equivalent to those in other Mediterranean areas, such as France or Spain. However, archaeology in Italy, carried out by British or Italian archaeologists, has benefited from the same theoretical underpinnings and methodological improvements that have influenced scholars elsewhere. Dunia Filippi aims to combine her background in topografia antica and landscape archaeology to understand in a broad sense the concepts of the monument and the place, the urban fabric, the townscape, and the territory. She draws on other disciplines, such as sociology, to study the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of the classical Roman city in Italy. In the book, Filippi develops her arguments by means of an in-depth case study, focusing on the monumental fulcrum of the city par excellence, the Forum Romanum in Rome. The study of the Forum is essential for understanding many aspects of the Roman city, particularly expressed through an interrelated understanding of the material, the economic, the symbolic, and the religious in antiquity and through time, a key element that percolates through various contributions in the book.

The volume edited by Dunia Filippi stems from scientific meetings organised by the editor and has a simple structure that places all the contributions in a logical order. The first section focuses on methodological approaches and consists of two chapters. Chapter 1, by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Martin Millett, deals with one of the most seminal examples of early British-Italian academic collaboration, that between Sir William Gell and Professor Antonio Nibby, with projects such as the Atlas of Ancient Rome, which laid the foundations of what was to become the discipline of topography and a particular way of understanding space, whether urban or rural. In Chapter 2, Stefano Campana elaborates on the relevance of methodological approaches to former townscapes or former urban centres, mainly through large-scale geophysical surveys. The author mainly compares the United Kingdom and Italy, as the figures provided for other Mediterranean countries are not fully representative of a trend because they are mostly referencing the work carried out in Italy. The chapter is fascinating for two reasons: on the one hand it emphasises the importance of geophysical results, something that many other contributions in both volumes rely on; on the other hand, it promotes the study of the archaeological continuum. This concept defines continuous cultural landscapes where many archaeological (human-made) features exist, for understanding the relationship between cities and the territory beyond them, in a rather original way of conceiving urban prospection in relation to Calvino's Invisible City (Reference Calvino1972).

Part II explores cities for which a rich array of data are available: Rome, Ostia, and Pompeii. This section contains a good selection of papers from different fields and research traditions dealing with exceptional datasets from prominent cities in Roman Italy. Chapter 3 by Paolo Carafa examines the topographic method applied to the archaeology of ancient Rome as a specific example of the important objective of studying landscape biographies. The author considers the Information System of Ancient Rome and research on the Baths of Agrippa and the Arch of Marcus Aurelius to demonstrate the power of using multiple literary and archaeological sources to ‘recover’ ancient urban landscapes. In Chapter 4, Jeffrey D. Veitch brings an original study of embodied space to Ostia, looking at the street porticoes to understand social interaction through public space in both its physical and imagined dimensions. Chapter 5 by Simon Keay is related to Campana's chapter, which examines the landscape between cities through geophysical prospection. In this case, the area between Ostia and Portus, the Isola Sacra, is the most exciting space for understanding the relationships between these two cities due to its geographical context and its functionality related to the funerary world. In Chapter 6, Annete van Haug and Philipp Kobusch take advantage of Pompeii's exceptional preservation to analyse visual communication in the city's streets. This includes a detailed study of different types of messages, particularly ritual and religious, that preserved on the walls either painted or carved in stone, and how this visual communication helps to understand the inner configuration of the city for the people who lived within it.

Finally, Part III on the Forum Romanum concludes the volume with four chapters, opening with Chapter 7 written by Dunia Filippi. In this chapter, the author and editor of the volume illustrates the changing nature of the Forum Romanum through several sets of data, mostly literary sources mentioning monuments. In doing so, she combines the various influences of landscape biography and the topographical method introduced earlier by Carafa. In Chapter 8, Nicholas Purcell examines in detail the historians of the Forum and how ancient history interpreted space in its multiple dimensions. Chapter 9 by Ray Laurence is devoted to the unusual topic of children in public space, an original perspective that highlights the role of children in civic life and in public spaces, as well as the need to incorporate this perspective into other types of research. John Patterson concludes the volume with Chapter 10, which is devoted to understanding the transformation of public space during the Principate, especially in dealing with the exciting phenomena of multiple fora.

Alessandro Launaro's volume, ‘Roman Urbanism in Italy’, takes a different direction compared to Filippi's. The volume does not explicitly stem from the academic traditions of Italy and the UK, but brings together a quality selection of scholars and study cases that represent well current research on landscape archaeology and the topographical method. The book is divided into five sections, including chapters by Italian and non-Italian scholars. This gives a broad sense of the importance of Italian archaeology for a common understanding of the Roman city. As in the previous volume, Part I is also devoted to methods and approaches. In this section, geo-prospection plays a primary role as a source of data. In Chapter 2, Martin Millett uses the extensive geophysical survey of Falerii Novi, a key site, to explore the development of the city, public spaces, and sacred buildings. One lesson to take away from this chapter is that ‘digging a trench to investigate a geophysical anomaly is a positivist fallacy, obvious to anyone who has wrestled with the analysis of complex stratigraphy’ (pp.10–11). Chapter 3 by Ian Haynes, Paolo Liverani, Thea Ravasi, and Stephen Kay presents the ambitious Rome Transformed project that focused on the Caelian Hill. This project combines not only topographical studies, including geophysical surveys and laser scanners in one of the most complex areas of modern Rome, but also an original method of presenting heritage reconstructions and visualisation, i.e. ‘provocations’, as the authors defined their practice of data representation. In Chapter 4, Giuseppe Ceraudo presents his research on Aquinum, another key case of data integration, in which aerial photography applied to archaeology is also crucial, as well as a topographical approach and a ground-penetrating radar survey.

Part II presents four studies on ‘textbook’ cities, mainly from the Republican period, a key period better represented in Italian territory than elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Chapter 5 by Andrea De Giorgi deals with Cosa, a Roman colony, where the author analyses the logic behind its location. In Chapter 6, Francesca Diosono updates the information on Fregellae, another key site for understanding the Roman Republic, whose state of preservation allows for multiple new analyses and studies. Chapter 7 by Cécile Evers, with an interesting title ‘One should always dress like a marble column’ (quotation of Jackie Kennedy-Onassis), presents the new research on Alba Fucens and updates the old and recent Belgian excavations on the site, with particular interest in the Marble Room and the remarkable calendar of the city, marking festivities and other ephemerides in the Fasti Albenses.

Part III presents cases of Roman cities that did not follow standard plans, thus provided a basis for understanding the peculiarities of how the Romans could modify preconceived urban plans to suit different geographical or historical scenarios. Chapter 8 by Stephen Kay, Sophie Hay, and Christopher Smith presents research on Locus Feroniae, where geophysical prospection has allowed us to evaluate how a sanctuary developed into a republican urban settlement in the 6^th century bc. In Chapter 9, Frank Vermeulen elaborates on his long-term research in the Potenza Valley with the study case of Septempeda, an example where non-invasive research, now including lidar and auger, is leading to a new understanding of civic integration in the Picenum region.

Part IV is dedicated to the analysis of the long-term evolution of urban centres, with three chapters. Chapter 10 by Simonetta Menchelli, Paolo Sangriso, Sivia Marini, and Rocco Marchechi provides an overview of research on the urban centre of Lunae from the Late Republic to Late Antiquity, focusing in particular on the Porta Marina quarter and the transformation of a residential area into a temple. In Chapter 11, Alessandro Launaro describes Interamna Lirenas, another site with extensive geophysical prospection data, a thorough survey programme, and a systematic combination of approaches for the ‘re(appraisal) of a Roman town’. The research on Aeclanum is presented in Chapter 12 by Ben Russell and Girolamo De Simone, another impressive work of geophysical prospection, leading to different lines of research, such as the modification of the urban layout of Aeclanum over time.

Finally, the last three chapters of Part V illustrate the life of urban centres in Late Antiquity and beyond. Chapter 13 by Patrizia Basso focuses on Aquileia in the 4^th and 5^th centuries ad, again using the excellent GPR surveys of Lieven Verdonck et al. (Reference Verdonck, Launaro, Vermeulen and Millett2020). The chapter focuses on two key elements, the market area and the wall, which are important places of urban life that will help in the study of many Late Antique cities. In Chapter 14, Alessia Morgi presents her analysis of the Parma Bridge using the topographic method, 3D reconstructions, and excavations. Finally, Chapter 15, written by John Patterson, provides an overview of the main advances presented in the previous chapters. The final chapter concludes the book in an excellent way, serving as a guide throughout the book and as a link to other readings like the first volume reviewed here.

Both books offer a refreshing perspective on Roman urbanism in Italy, addressing key aspects of urban organization, such as the role of the Forum Romanum and the origins of Rome's distinctive historical layout. These ideas are traced across the Roman and Late Roman periods. This urban model, having been imitated throughout the Mediterranean, holds significant value for Roman archaeologists.

The two books share important features. Firstly, they emphasize the use of non-invasive methods, which are increasingly prevalent in the field. Such approaches should be regarded as equally valuable as traditional methodologies. Secondly, both volumes adopt a theoretical perspective, consistently referencing landscape archaeology and topografia antica. This theoretical depth is a welcome contribution for those seeking a robust and well-founded framework for understanding the ancient city in Italy and beyond.