Overview

The Tiber river winds through the center of Rome. In the 16th century, the river was fundamental to the city's life, providing water supply for drinking, washing, and industrial uses, as well as local fishing. Its rapid current powered Rome's grain mills, which ground the flour that was the basis of its food supply. The Tiber was also the depository for tons of sewage and other refuse that the city generated daily. Yet, just as the river supported Rome's life, it also threatened it. Since antiquity, the Tiber had flooded periodically, often with devastating consequences. With the city's growing population clustered in the low-lying flood plain near the riverbanks and the increasing severity of events due to climate change, the Tiber flood of October 8, 1530 was catastrophic. It was also a bitter sequel to the traumatic Sack of Rome of May 1527. Luis Gómez's The Floods of the Tiber of 1531 was motivated and informed by his own experience of this disaster. It bears eloquent witness to how he used his humanist methods and scholarship to cope with personal and community crisis. Gómez provides an eyewitness account of this major environmental disaster and an example of how contemporaries analyzed the causes and consequences of such events. He also offers a rich and varied example of how humanists could mobilize their written and material sources, exercise skills in reading and historical interpretation, use the past to make sense of the present, and reimagine the future. As we confront an array of increasing environmental challenges, Gómez's work offers both method and hope. This translation by Chiara Bariviera, Pamela O. Long, and William L. North is a collective effort of different expertises ranging from Roman archaeology and topography to late ancient, medieval, and early modern history of science, technology, urbanism, and culture. The editors have produced a clear, accurate, and readable English version of the original 1531 Latin edition - here also transcribed in full for the first time - accompanied by an informative introduction, expert annotations, and comprehensive bibliography. 176 pages, 17 illustrations, introduction, notes, bibliography, index.

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9781599104522

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Luis Gómez was born c.1482 in Orihuela, Valencia. After his initial studies close to home, he pursued the study of civil and canon law at the University of Bologna before moving to Padua to take up a teaching position by 1522. There he is known to have lectured on the Institutes of Justinian as well as canon law. By 1528, he was serving at the papal court in Rome as an auditor of the Rota, that is, a judge in one of the papal tribunals called the Sacra Romana Rota. He then became director of the Penitenzieria Apostolica (the Apostolic Penitentiary), which was a papal tribunal with jurisdiction over such matters as the issue of indulgences and absolutions from excommunications. In 1534, he was made bishop of Sarno, located east of Naples. As attested in an epigraph from a church in Orihuela, he died in 1542 in the city of Macerata in the Marches and was buried in its cathedral. Chiara Bariviera studied classical archeology and worked at La Sapienza University of Rome on research projects in Rome, Pompeii, and Veii. Her studies center on Roman topography and the development of urban landscapes, with a special interest in public architecture and the reconstruction of monumental complexes. Pamela O. Long is a historian of late medieval and early modern European science and technology, and cultural history. Her fellowships include those from American Academy in Rome, the Guggenheim Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Her books include Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2001); Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences (2011); and Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (2018).

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