It is always of interest when a glimpse ‘from the outside’ rests on something that we know very well because, in this case, the glimpse is less conditioned than ours by the circumstance of ‘immersion’ in a particular, given reality. For this reason and with great interest, I read the book written by Rabun M. Taylor on Naples, the city where I was born, where I live and work as an architect. T.'s glimpse is, from my point of view, in two ways ‘external’. First, perhaps banally, because he is a citizen of a country with a completely different history, but also, in a more interesting way, because his education is not that of a practising architect, but rather that of classical studies.

The book Ancient Naples: A Documentary History, Origins to c. 350 CE is therefore a meticulous and detailed history of Naples in ancient times, developed through two different categories of sources: on one hand the written texts and on the other hand the material sources, the archaeological finds which, as the author rightly points out, in Naples have been rarely ‘sought’ but usually ‘found’, frequently following calamitous events, as in the case of the 1980 earthquake, or found ‘by chance’ — for example, the most recent discoveries linked to excavations for the strengthening of the city subway network.

The book is certainly a scientific work, as demonstrated also by its critical apparatus — Illustrations, Readings, Commentaries, Bibliography and Index of Names. It refers to methodologies and tools specific to the disciplines of historical and classical studies which, at least in part, differ from the methodologies and tools employed in the discipline in which I work, studied and today teach at the University of Naples. In fact, if one could briefly state that the object being observed is the same — the city — the perspective of historical studies is diachronic while, on the other hand, that of urban studies, especially in a certain ‘Italian tradition’, is synchronic: the city is, in the physical, real space of our present, the accumulation of the long span of its history, a sort of ‘stone palimpsest’. This difference in point of view leads the disciplines to look differently at the same ‘objects of observation’. Everything is a ‘document’ for historians — the bibliographic, iconographic and physical sources are in a certain sense on the same level — as everything tells us about the life of man and the society that produced those documents and thus the perspective is, with this recognition of value, that of conservation. Conversely, the architect is forced to make a choice by virtue of a value judgement, which can only be ‘formal’, and to observe the city as a stratified organism in which not everything has an equal right to be transmitted to future generations.

In T.'s book — as already noted, a rigorous text from its precise disciplinary point of view, organised into chapters that, chronologically, tell the history of Naples from its foundation to the early Christian city — sometimes I glimpsed a perspective that, as an architect, I felt ‘familiar’, alongside that of the rigorous historian. Following the Introduction, the author begins with a chapter about the period of the city's origins but which, in fact, explains a peculiar characteristic of the city of Naples which it shares with most of the ancient cities in Mediterranean context: the form of the city cannot be explained except in terms of a very close relationship with the forms of the geographical substratum that hosts them, with the forms of the Earth. Similarly, the chapter on The Culture of Water also somehow escapes the strictly chronological arrangement and tells us not only of the great infrastructural works that have made life in the city possible, but also of those practices linked to health and leisure that, once again, found their elective place of settlement in some western areas of the city as a result of the relationship to the Earth, to the volcanic character of the Campi Flegrei — from the ancient Greek φλέγω, phlégō, ‘I burn’ — and thus the presence of thermal waters.

Finally, I found in this book a sort of interscalarity: the small clay fragment and the traces of the Roman centuriatio extended over a territory that even crosses the borders of the current metropolitan city are all useful traces, for the author, to create his documentary history. T.'s history is a thorough investigation: everything I know, or almost everything, about the ancient history of my city and of its places, sometimes hidden or concealed by a distracted perception, is in this book. It is an extraordinary fresco of the ancient city, included on the UNESCO world heritage list, above all because, for two millennia, it has preserved unchanged not only its monuments but also the ‘form of the plan’ that has not assumed the character of an archaeological ruin but is still able to host the life of its inhabitants.