I don’t easily absorb quantities of detail unless I read with my eyes, and while I wasn’t certain how important all these details about the House would turn out to be (did I need to have a mental map of its Halls and Vestibules?) I was willing to take the risk. My answer would usually be both – I can’t resist a good puzzle – but Piranesi is a rare book in which the answer was simply the latter. Do you read to work out the answers or to enjoy the experience? Piranesi is itself just such a narrative, of course making this a tacit challenge to the reader. But when Piranesi rejects the Other’s search for Knowledge – deciding that to unpick the House’s secrets would be to devalue the House, whose faithful and beloved Child he is – it’s hard not to read his decision as meta commentary on puzzle box narratives. Besides, I love a bit of fantasy science, so Piranesi’s idiosyncratic calendar system and his lists of statues didn’t put me off, although this was largely because they were being read to me by the rich tones of Chiwetel Ejiofor I’m not sure I’d have so blithely navigated them – or the errant and inaudible Capitalisation of Nouns – in print.Īs the story unfolds, we’re invited to consider philosophy, the nature of the House (rich in allusion) and the mystery of Piranesi’s identity. There were enough questions implicit in the narrative to snare my curiosity. The Other – clearly living a rather different life in the same space – appears to have access to a mobile device (although Piranesi doesn’t recognise it as such). Along with his seventeenth century natural philosophy, he casually mentions incongruently modern things like crisp packets and fish fingers (whilst being baffled by place names and concepts such as university or the police). It’s clear from the start that Piranesi probably isn’t a reliable guide to the House. Piranesi – not his real name, although he’s happy to let his only friend call him by it – styles himself a scholar and a scientist, in spite of his ragged state and tendency to deduce ‘facts’ from the flights of birds and the gaze of statues. What Clarke delivers instead is an often odd, sometimes naive, always charming account of a young man’s attempt to catalogue his world. I used to force finish books back then – these days, I would no doubt tap out early rather than end up with a long-standing grudge based on hours of resentful reading about the bickering of two arrogant men I didn’t care about.Īrguably, Piranesi is another fantasy of arrogant men bickering about points of principle, but – thankfully – this largely happens off-page (and neither of them are Piranesi). Does his only friend – the only other living person in the House – really have Piranesi’s best interests at heart?įull disclosure: I hated Jonathan Strange and Doctor Norrell. As he tries to makes sense of his world, he finds himself increasingly driven to keep secrets from the Other. Around these Piranesi arranged a detailed index listing the monuments according to their assigned number and referring to relevant passages in his major publications, including the Antichita Romane, Della Magnificenza and Campo Marzio.' (John Wilton-Ely)Orientation of the map with south at the top., Size : 1010x710 (mm), 39.75x27.875 (Inches), Black & White.A young scholar explores and documents the House, an endless palace of vestibules, halls and statues lapped by ceaseless tides. This is augmented by a smaller map isolating the principal antiquities, which were marked with numbers corresponding to those in the larger map. He therefore produced a large map of the modern city within Aurelian Walls, together with an extension showing the territory to the north, between Porto del Popolo and Ponte Milvio and including the Campus Martius area. Exercising his skills in presenting formidable quantities of information coherently, he sought to relate the surviving remains of antiquity to the contemporary topography of Rome and to offer way reference to published information about them. He may have felt the need for a reference map to accompany collections of these plates and devised this work, usually found in associations with the Veduta, to fill this need.

First Paris Edition'By the mid-1770's, at the height of his career, Piranesi had produced a comprehensive record of ancient and modern Rome in the form of the well over a hundred plates of the Veduta di Roma.

Piranesi book map