Chapter 2 looks at the continuities in perception of the city between antiquity and the later period, looking at representations (images) and panegyrics. In terms of how cities were represented (especially in painting and sculpture), there is striking continuity in the emphasis on the wall circuit with gates and towers as the defining element of the city. The extensive tradition of panegyrics of individual cities (laudes urbium), the models set by Greek and Roman rhetorical manuals, was followed into the Middle Ages. The principal contrast lies in religion, but the economy, politics, and physical structures of the city are treated as belonging to a continuous tradition, and later cities are celebrated for the imitation of antiquity and, above all, of Rome.

Chapter 1 concentrates on the extent to which the relative fluidity of belief that was tolerated prior to the late 1540s in Italy was manifested visually. It analyses cases of artists who embraced theological ideas that would later be deemed doctrinally unacceptable by the Catholic Church, highlighting the complexities of reading heterodox meanings into their output.

Patronage and commissioning of public events and buildings was a key tool in the attainment and replication of social status in antiquity. In the early Middle Ages, new ideals emerged around Christian forms of wealth and support, and different values were attached to the acquisition of agricultural land. Urban properties took on new relevance, and agricultural property became socially valuable in new ways. Cultivated spaces within cities came to be newly prestigious. This chapter considers the principal means by which aristocrats and rulers performed status and power within the late antique and early medieval cities of Italy, marshalling the new evidence of urban cultivation to inform our understanding of power in the built environment. It then develops three examples of this process from the mid eighth century to the early tenth, in Rome, Ravenna, and Naples. These examples show clearly the sophisticated strategies employed by rulers, ecclesiastical institutions, and families alike to control cultivated spaces, and the social status which came with successful strategies.