A breezy sketch of Roman history intertwined with trenchant art and architectural criticism, culminating in the sad observation that the Eternal City lost its leadership of the visual arts after World War II. Rome could not have ruled without concrete for its buildings, roads, and aqueducts, the projection of power. Greek culture captivated the Latins, which adopted its gods for purposes legitimacy and succession. Yet piety (i.e., ancestor worship) was the highest praise of a Roman; only Victorian England’s certainty of divine assent for White Man’s Burden is comparable. Augustus (r. 27BC-14AD) refurbished the Roman state’s governance; Constantine (r. 306-337AD) revamped citizenship by allowing Christians to be tried in church courts. Losing to the Goths at Adrianople (378AD) shook Roman confidence like nothing since Cannae six centuries earlier. Skipping ahead to the Renaissance (which started in Florence), the new forms of architecture recalled classic Rome, then hidden by ruin and overgrowth in a town reduced to 25,000 inhabitants. The style was ‘truth of representation’ as well as a faithfulness. After the Council of Trent (1543-68) kicked off the Counterreformation – don’t argue with Luther, show superior emotion and intensity – Sixtus V (from 1585) created the basis of modern Rome with rebuilding, shaping the Baroque age of religious art. Thence to neoclassicism, a noble simplicity, calm grandeur. To again jump ahead: the Futurists despised the authority of Roman tradition, seemingly an underappreciated milestone in the postwar loss of primacy (in an aside, Hughes suggests no city has been so compromised by the auto). Hughes opines Rome’s energies were spent, its classicism no longer inspiring to emerging artists. Coda the ‘freedom’ of abstract art leads to monotony, because over time there’s no anchorage to the real world. What really underpins variety is a connection to things as they appear; the world is sufficiently full of wonder.