ONE LOVE ONE HEARTのONE TALK ONE TIME #166

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He's still on the couch, astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Make up these may apply. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Johna Byers, and I'm here today with Elizabeth Rodini to talk about her new book on the streets of the hidden shops. One city block, 2,000 years, and a walk through the layered lives of Rome. Out this year, 2026 with the University of Chicago Press. Hello, Elizabeth. Hi, Yana. How are you, this beautiful fall day? I'm doing great. Thank you. I'm in my apartment in New York with my beautiful dog who's listening in, so I'm looking forward to talking to you. I'm so glad to meet with you and your dog, who I'm sure will have some really important eye, like eye lifts, or some sort of maybe a tail wag for our very interesting conversation. I hope so. All right, so my first question is pretty much always the same, but I don't know that I've ever been this excited to ask it, which is, how did you come to write this book? Well, I was living and working in Rome. At the time, I was at the American Academy in Rome, and I think my three-year term was starting to wrap up, and I was looking for what I was going to do next, and doing my usual kind of weekend wandering around the city. And I went into the Crypto Ball B Museum, which is on Via Delibotegeo Escure, which is where the name of my book comes from, right in the center of the city. And I had visited before, but I don't know, it was a moment where I was particularly entranced by it. It is a site-specific museum in many ways. So it's built atop a really important archaeological find and dig that I write about in the book. And kind of tells a story of that site, while also then becoming a museum of the history of Rome. That was particularly taken by the sort of site-specificness of it, right? So you have the streets of Rome underneath, you have finds from the dig that were conducted on the site that tell the history of various institutions on the site. And it was the kind of thing I love, I kind of like micro-history deep dives. And I left it thinking, wow, this is really cool. Someone should tell the world about this place. And then I decided I would take a walk around the block and see what had happened since 1500, 1600. And within the first 100 yards, I found a plaque to the discovery of the body of Aldo Moro, who was the former prime minister who was assassinated by the Red Brigade in 1978 and left there in his car, very famous event in Italian history, right on that block. I turned the corner and there's a closed church where a man was building a shelter out of cardboard in the front door and I thought, wow, this is another story. There's life unfolding on this block now among regular people, people who were struggling. And then I found a plaque to a poet. And then I found a monument to a five-year-old girl who had been abducted during the round up of the Roman Jews in 1943. And I kept going. And it was this combination of little tiny markers and evidence of life also in the way the buildings had been rebuilt in the kinds of scars that you can see on the walls of buildings. And it occurred to me that this story that was being told inside the museum had continued right into the present around the buildings itself. And so I thought, there's a bigger story to tell here than even the one that is unfolding inside the museum. And that became my kind of post-American Academy project. I became an absolute nerd about this block. I know so much about it. I think the Romans think I'm insane. I'm sure. I'm sure they think you're quirky but whatever. Let's drink some coffee. I love this moment. I love this moment. I've had these kinds of moments when you're walking, just walking, minding your own business. And you realize there's some more in steps and you're like, this has been here forever. How long? How many centuries of people have walked on these steps? This is why they're probably quite dangerous now or something. Yeah. That's my experience constantly in Rome and I've been entranced by that forever. I remember visiting, going back to my elementary school in Madison, Wisconsin, where I grew up and seeing the marble steps leading up to where my first grade classroom was and seeing them worn out and thinking, wow, lots and lots of people. Well, walked here, including me when I was a kid. I mean, I've had this kind of fascination of the kind of ghosts of the past that are in the spaces we occupy forever. And I just thought, well, this is a chance to really, who were these people and really dig into some of these stories? Yeah, that's so cool. It's also, this is also the sort of book I adore. The micro history, this deep dive, all the layers of this building, all the layers of history and all the layers of a story being woven together, it's a book I would love to write. Maybe someday, I'll find the thing and write it as well. But yeah, because it's a Roman story, like this block, but it's also, you could do this, I mean, no, no, very few places are going to be quite as detailed and quite as multivalent as Rome, but there is this kind of most places have this sense of like all of these things that happen and we're just wandering through on this timeline, this one little time. Yeah, that's absolutely true and not just in Rome, and I encourage people to go out there front doors and see what they see. It's sort of this close looking that we can all do and sort of tune into our environments. And the people have asked me often, well, is this block, could you do this in any block in Rome? And the answer is always, well, yes and no, I mean, yes, every place has this sort of stratification of history. The question is, what is there to see? And one of the things that's unique about this place, even in Rome, is that so much of it has survived because it was kind of left alone for so long. And that's a really important point. So much of Rome was either dug up and so all that's left is, you know, the imperial or republican monuments. And we know this was how archaeology was practiced until pretty recently. And you know, under the fascists, it was done to the hill because they wanted to uncover all those great imperial monuments that they were aspiring to be, you know, the heirs to, or the other thing that happens in Rome and in many places is they built huge buildings on top of them. So all those beautiful Baroque palaces you go to see, or the churches that you go to see in building those, they really, what was underneath the substrates were destroyed. And this place was unique because it was kind of built around and over but never in the same kind of destructive way. It was for the most part more smaller, more temporary structures. So it didn't destroy the substructure in the same way, the substrates in the same way. And at the same time, there were all these things happening on top of it that left remains. So it's, yes, you could do it anywhere, but it survived in a particular way that makes it accessible to archaeologists and to historians. And let's talk about getting at that. So there's an archaeological dig. Thank you, thank you, Powers of the Bee and the goddess in whomever. But there's also a lot of literary sources and like what we would consider like proper historical sources. Can you tell us about those? Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, is there a goddess or a god of archaeology because there should be? I would name that god Daniela Manacorta who was still, it is an archaeologist in Rome and he led a dig on this site in beginning in building 1981-1982. And it was a very, very important dig. It really redefined how we think about many eras of Rome that had been pretty much written off as uninteresting, nothing happened, the dark ages. And what Manacorta did is he implemented something called stratigraphic archaeology in this urban site, which means archaeology that's conducted in very careful, mindful, digging down through layers and kind of looking carefully at every layer. It's kind of what we think about when we think of archaeology, right? But before that, that's really not how archaeology was practiced. You know, I alluded before to this idea of kind of treasure hunting, right? Just go for the great monument in a place like Rome that was especially alluring. So he brought this practice that had been developed really in the UK and used a little bit in rural areas of Italy but never to an urban site before. And that was huge. And in digging up this site, he and his team of college students, which is really cool to think about. He just brought in college students to help him. And he trained a whole generation of archaeologists who are now very much leaders in their fields in Italy. And they found evidence from the 20th century, the 19th century, they found what came to be known as the Munditzaro, the garbage dump of an 18th century convent. That really criticized for paying time and money on this, what was a garbage dump in the view of many archaeologists, but it was full of remains of life in this site, in particular a convent that we can talk about that was on this site. So, you know, to get to the point, they found all sorts of traces of daily life in this dig because they were paying attention to the ordinary that they found in the layers of the site. And then there are archives and we can talk about those. The most important of those probably has to do with this convent school that I've been talking about called the Conservatory of Santa Caterina de La Rosa. And this was a kind of a, they called it a conservatory. It was a cloistered environment for young girls who were considered by the church to be at risk of Malavita falling into a bad life. They were really originally in the 16th century the daughters of prostitutes who the church was really worried that these girls were in a bad state and in danger. So they started providing a safe environment for them that was cloistered. It became really quite, quite restricted and really more like a prison, in my opinion. But there's a huge archive about this convent, you know, we know what they ate, we know what they could bring in what they were not allowed to have, we knew, we know the size of the dowry. So there's a written archive. So those are just two examples of the kinds of sources that exist. And of course the farther back we get into the past, those archival records become thinner and thinner and it's really about pulling out little tiny references to what happened on site. But I was very much indebted to scholars who worked on these areas themselves. And I was in the fortunate position of being able to follow other scholars, trails in identifying documents. And then there were some that I found that hadn't been looked at, especially those from the 20th century. So I hope that answers your question. It's a range of written sources, a material sources, but the remarkable thing for me is the sources of sort of the forgotten people whose lives would have otherwise just been disappeared into, you know, the myths of time or the garbage heaps of time. I mean, that's one of the things about archival work is this stratigraphic archival work where you look for people that no one cared about until the 70s, 80s, 90s, right. And that's, there's something very similar. We would look through all of that to get to the important man who did the important things instead of looking at the things that actually matter to how we all live. Right. One of the really fascinating stories. And I have an ambition to explore this more in some other written form, but I have evidence. And this, I had learned about this through other sources, but I really tried to learn more about it of two girls who, well, one who disappeared from this conference school around, I think was 1610. And another who was stolen back by her mother and her father. And, you know, there are these tiny little threads of these women's lives or these girls' lives, but pretty much in the church, the institution really wanted to suppress this. So I really make them the protagonist of the story. And then I try to fill in their life based on all of these other forms of evidence that we have, what they ate, what they wore, what they were allowed to do, what they weren't allowed to do. We know a lot about how they lived. And we know that these two people existed. One we don't even know the name of. She kind of goes unnamed because the institution didn't want to talk about a girl that disappeared. But the other was her mother was basically put on trial. So we have trial records, but still these slip away in a general history of the institution. And we can fill in their stories through all these other kinds of resources that we have, including material things that give us the sense of the texture of daily life. Yeah, and I mean, this is a it's annoying to say this in another historian said it to me, I'd be annoyed, but like the Lucuna tell you a lot too. Well, I think that's kind of what's what's interesting. Yeah, what's right, what are they not talk about? So this all we know, we know from a neighbor who lived nearby that they stopped doing these processions that the girls would be taken on processions through the street twice a year. And it was clearly, I mean, allegedly about taking them to pray at certain churches, but it was actually really about getting them out to be seen because the goal of this institution was to get them married. And if they're all coistered away, no one knows they're there, they don't get married. And one year they stopped doing the processions and they stopped for about 30 years. And that's not really written about it happens, it seems to coincide with the disappearance of this girl. And in fact, when they reinstate the processions, they have all these new rules about who can come near the girls who can't what you can't give them gifts, you can't approach them in church. So often like the Lucuna, it's the what you can't do dictates that tell you what people were doing, right? You don't have to tell you not to do it unless you're doing it. So the book has basically two through lines. There is a very legible historical story line that hops a bit forward and continues to the modern day. And then there are also these series, these beautiful series, beautiful vignettes, sometimes objects or moments. And I'm curious how you as the author made the decision to structure the book in this interesting and fairly unusual way. Yeah, it's a great question and partly it came out of necessity and it takes us back to this point about Lucuna. And you alluded to this also in your question just now. The book has 10 or 11 chapters depending on how you if you count the introduction as a chapter. And there's a chapter on a person, a general 13 BCE. Then there's a chapter that spans about, I don't know, 1200 to 1500 talking about lime burning, which sounds like it's deadly boring, but it's actually really pretty fascinating. It's this practice of burning the marbles of ancient Rome in order to rebuild new monuments, usually churches, sort of the city eating itself. And you'll notice that there's over a 1000 year gap in that period because there just isn't a whole lot to draw on that survives, right? And even what we have from 13 BCE is really scraps that I, you know, and the archaeological site itself, which is the fundamental monument there is this theater built by this general. So there is basically a huge gap. And then once I get to about 1500, I have lots of great stories and lots more resources. Part of my challenge was how do I tell, how do I show that things were happening in this 1000 year period where I don't have big stories, but I have lots of little scraps of archaeological finds, usually, or something in a document that tells me that something small happened. So I use those to help fill in. So it partly it was a way of filling in gaps, right? And just to give you a few quick examples for people who are listening, I talk about in that period, for example, there's evidence of a baker's, a bakery from about 550 of the common era, I think. But it's right adjacent, it's on this block, it's adjacent to this ancient theater that sat there. And so, you know, I write a 300 word little piece about the baker at work and I draw on all sorts of evidence. that we have about how bakeries worked and what they smelled like and what they sounded like. So to try and give a sense of the vitality of life in an era for which we have a very, very little tangible evidence. So it was partly a way of filling in an area where we seem to know nothing but actually we know little bits and trying to bring them to life. It was also a way of trying to tell more minor stories, you know. I have one of these vignettes is about a donkey. And all I know is that these archaeologists that I talked about earlier found a donkey skeleton. And the only reason I know that is I found it in the archive of the archaeological dig and it's sort of dated late medieval donkey. And from there I thought, okay well what's a donkey doing here? I talked to archaeologist archaeo botanists to figure out what we could know about the landscape. I talked to a person I know who owns a donkey about one donkey's eight because I'm presuming it hasn't changed much since that period. And so it gives a sense of what was going on in this space. Who was living here? It wasn't just people there were animals. So it helped me fill in sort of the spectrum of life and fill in areas where I had less information. And then finally I think it I did also draw on things that I saw as I was walking around the block. You know I noticed for example that there were different ways of numbering the doors and I thought well why is that? So I started to look into when did they start to number streets? You know you've gone to Italy and sometimes the street numbers make no sense compared to what you grew up with in United States, right? They they run up a block and down or sometimes they're different colors or sometimes they have numbers and letters. When did this practice start of numbering houses? And why? Why did they start doing this? And how did it change your experiences as someone walking down the street? So I tried to you know read the walls and use those to ask questions about when it meant to live in this place, how people lived in it, how they move through. But you know recommendations can be great. Maybe someone recommended this podcast and here you are. But home projects are different. If a podcast isn't your thing, you lose a few minutes. If you hired your cousin's neighbor to mount your TV, you might end up with a lopsided screen and wall damage. Maybe I know a guy just isn't enough for your home. That's why thumbtack works. It matches you with top rated local pros, with photos, reviews and credentials all in one place. For your next home project, try thumbtack. Higher the right pro today. Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of The Nubics Network and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor and I love maps. So I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the best education podcast at the 2025 British podcast awards. What's your map is hosted by a historian and prize-winning author, Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast at oculi-mundi.com while you listen. Jerry's guests include Zakiya Siwell, who's an English broadcaster and writer-unfinding Albion Yoshmit, who's the head of maps at the Zurich Central Library, Pat Seed, a US historian on told me his world map. John Romero, who's a legendary video game producer on the Doom game creator, Elif Shahraq, a well-known Turkish British novelist and Czech venduzer, a historian who will tell you about Martin Valkseemuller's Carter Marina of 1645. I highly encourage you to subscribe to What's Your Map. It's available on Apple, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. You know, that was a, that was a revelation. That's a revelation for me. Because when I've stayed in a hotel, you're fine. You go to the hotel. But anytime I've ever had an apartment in Rome, I have had to ask somebody who lives there how to get like, I'm looking at number 107 and number two. How and how and they're like, ah, oh, careful. Let's go down this alley and back up those back steps. Right, and you still have to do that. But the numbering system, you know, it's not the one we're familiar with. So, you know, they didn't solve the problem. But, you know, right, and I guess that's another point. How can we make the past present through our own experiences? We've all had that experience of trying to find an address and having to ask and they say, oh, you need to go to the butcher shop and then go and ask the guy and then go around the corner. And this was an attempt to kind of, you know, regularize that. Didn't necessarily work. But so, you know, also, can we embody the experiences of people in the past? How could we get to that point? You know, obviously there are limits, but there are ways in which people are people and we're still trying to navigate and make sense of our environment. Yeah, we are still roughly the same shape and we're trying to find the baker. And yes, and we still appreciate a nice loaf of bread. Yes, absolutely. So, um, let's go back a little bit. Where does this guy start? What's our first like, when, let's go back to when Rome is a baby. So, I start with, I start with geology. That's my being, you know, I'm going to start with the earth and that and give people the lay of the land of why something was built where it was and why the block that I'm looking at grew up where it did. And that was a suggestion of a dear friend of mine who's an artist named David Brooks. He said, you have to go back to the rock. So, I'm back to the rock. But the first real chapter and the first narrative chapter is about the theater of a guy named Lucius Cornelius Balbus who was kind of, you know, let's say an arrogant, somewhat violent, somewhat egotistical as I imagine him figure from the first century BCE. And he was a big supporter of Julius Caesar. He was involved in the war between Caesar and Pompey. He ended up kind of having various government positions. And at a certain point, he was sent to Africa by Augustus. I imagine that Augustus wanted to send him as far away as possible because he was clearly troubled. And we know this from letters. So to get to the point of the kinds of records we're using, he's mentured in letters back and forth from Cicero and others. And he fought wars against the people of the Sahara Desert, the Garamanti's people. And he came back a triumphant general and the emperor Augustus awarded him a triumphal procession, which was a big deal. He was the first non-native war in citizen in Rome to be awarded a procession. And he was a triumphant. And he was the last non-member of the imperial family to be awarded the triumph. So he was a pretty significant moment in Balbus's career. And he was encouraged by Augustus then to build a more permanent monument to his triumphs. And he built a theater complex. And this was over time buried by the rubble of time. But the four court of this theater, which was a very large kind of colonnated court, survived and was reused over centuries and centuries. And it's this court that is called the Crypto-Baldi. Crypto-Porticus is the name of a covered courtyard. So my block that I write about is the Crypto-Baldi block. It is the place where Balbus built this courtyard. And then I write about all the things that happened on that site. But we know, so this gets to the point of what we know and what we don't know. We know almost nothing about this theater. But we have this crap of a record from a historian of the area or a direst of the area, Cassius Dio, who tells us that on the day that this theater was supposed to be inaugurated and you can imagine what a big deal this was going to be for Balbus. Think about politicians with theaters and how important those can be to them. As monuments, I'm just going to say that. There's a huge flood. And he can't open his theater. He can't celebrate. He can't go through all the pomp and circumstance that he had envisioned. So this is something we know. That's about it. But we, you know, we can confirm that. And the the theater is right by the river. Floods a lot in this time. So there's no reason not to believe this. So my story is really set around this general on the day of this supposed opening that's now flooded and basically how pissed off he is. And this is a story in which I really, I mean, I invent quite a bit because it's told in his head, but it's all really based on, you know, scraps of Roman history from mostly from text, but also then the archaeological surroundings. So that's where it starts. It starts in this theater complex. And I think one of the reasons the block survived the way it did is because it was this big open space that then was occupied and re-occupied over the centuries for different purposes and was never really built over the way other monuments in central Rome were. Can you imagine trying to open your theater and suddenly it floods? I would have been mad too. I would have too. Why God, why? - Right, right, white gods. - White gods, white river god, what have you done to me? - And he must have been an incredibly kind of arrogant person. We know some of his actions through letters talking about. Oh, he wrote a play about himself that he performed in his native town, or he had performed in his native town of Cadiz. And people wrote letters about how he sat in the audience and cried at his own theatrics. I mean, he was clearly a really pompous man. So he makes a great opening character. So that's the opening and that's the site and that's where we get this word Crypta Balbi, which I talked about the Crypta Balbi Museum. That's why it's called that. It seems like a strange name, but that's where it comes from. It's really an archeological term and refers to its general. - All right, and then in this space, we have a Mithraya temple, other burials including the donkey. I love that you know someone with a donkey. Let's talk about the city circa 800 CE, which is a big year in European history for a little farther north, but it's just a really nice place to check in at where it was kind of the early modern era or the early medieval era. - Right, and that's, you remember I mentioned that there was this dig that really changed how Rome was understood and that's one of the moments, actually, that's really comes to a new light because of this archeological dig that Daniela Monacorta conducted. And actually, I interviewed a lot of his students or people about my age and one of them told me about a group of American college students that came one summer and that they found something really critical that helped understand this year around 800. They came in and as people who know a European educational system, the Italians on this dig were really expert on archeology, they spoke ancient, they knew the ancient languages, they had been deeply trained in this material. And the Americans who came from Colgate University were a mix of students of all different fields in this sort of more general education that we tend to have. And I think the Italians really enjoyed having them there, but they didn't really know what to have them do 'cause they didn't have the training. So they told me that they set up these huge sivs and they set the Americans to work siving the dirt that they were carefully digging. And in this siving, they were finding all these little things and they found a whole series of little tiny coins from about 800. And these coins really came to demonstrate along with a lot of other things that were dug up from the same site that Rome around 800 actually had a very vital economy that it was trading across the Mediterranean still that it had an active currency, that it had a sort of local government that was beginning to consolidate itself politically. And they found some luxury goods, they found a chess board, they found all sorts of things in what was basically a dump outside a monastery that was on the block, Henrik Date theorizes that there was a flood, it waterlogged this monastery and they just took all of the damaged stuff and threw it in this pit. And so they found this trash heap from about 800. And it really showed that there was a life that was actually much richer, much more complicated, much more connected with the Mediterranean world than had ever been really realized before. So that's what's going on. We still don't have a whole lot of specific evidence. So I write a vignette about, I think pilgrims in that moment and pilgrims walking down this sort of very important route through the center of Rome. And this is very an early moment in that process, I guess, of pilgrimage. But you know, you begin to see Rome in a fuller picture because of what these young archaeologists found. And it's really, I think a lot of these people really got turned on to archaeology 'cause they thought, wow, you know, we've really changed how we under, in a sense we've rewritten history through our discoveries. - Yeah, I mean, that really is incredibly fundamental. They'll probably never do anything like that ever again. - That's right, they had their big, they peaked at age 22. - Yeah, most professional historians don't do anything anywhere near that ever. - Right, it's really pretty cool. Full study abroad. - Right, wow, that's a study abroad changed me moment right there. - Yeah, and then we do spend a lot of time with Lyme and I wanna talk a little bit more about how cool Lyme is. - Lyme is really cool. I have to thank my friend Lynn Landcaster who is an expert in ancient Roman building and I consulted her a lot about Lyme. Lyme is essentially the powder that's made when you burn Lyme's stone or marble. And there's all sorts of things you can do with it. They used it for medications and in cosmetics and in paint and on the gardens and for the plants. And I mean, in a certain combination, you could sort of plug holes with it. It's an incredibly useful and adaptable material. But the most important thing that was done was to burn it and make it into mortar. And this was a big production. You take these huge pieces of marble, you take them off the buildings and you build big kilns and you incinerate this marble into powder. And then you can mix it with water and you can make mortar. And it's a really big and dangerous operation too because somehow the chemical properties are very volatile. And as you burn it, it's extremely dangerous and it can catch fire. And so people like Pliny and even St. Augustine wrote about Lyme because it was sort of a metaphor for burning something and turning it into something else for transformation and redemption and things like that. But the crypt of Aldi and this area around it was a great sight to do this kind of work because all of that marble facing was everywhere. It was falling off his ancient buildings. It was actually sort of a hazard, right? It chunks of marble falling down. So you're going to do something with it. And they would build the kilns right there. We know that there were at least six kilns over the course of, close to 1,000 years, built within the confines of the crypt of Aldi. And it's like your material was right there. You just take it off and you put it into kiln and you burn it and make it sound easy. But it was right there. You didn't have to cart it across the city. And this was a really important industry. We have records. And here we get to that question of who are the sources. We have written sources that track who was selling marble to the Vatican, for example. The works of the Vatican to build things there or to build other churches across Rome. And we know that a lot of families that lived right on the block were involved in that trade, and particularly this family called the Saragona family. So this is an important industry. It really keeps this area of the city going. And I have a chapter online. And here is another place where I kind of invent a bit. And one of the things that became fascinating to me was that this rumor of something called marvelous lime that was extremely strong, extremely-- we don't know what was so marvelous about it. But evidently, it really worked well. And that maybe they were burning some kind of special marble to do that, like statuary. And in these kilns, there's a kiln at the Coup de Balbi that was destroyed in an earthquake. And we find around it the marble that they were getting ready to burn. And there's evidence that they were burning marble that was not just the facing of buildings, but maybe actually statuary and other more precious kinds of marble. So I imagine that the Saragona's are making this marvelous lime. So kind of put together these stories. And again, it's because of the scant records we have, how do we bring this story to life? And I put all this in the voice of a woman who was a descendant of the family and sort of entered a convent near the block. You keep saying I made this up. And I understand why you're doing that. And I understand kind of how our colleagues tend to look at anything that is the least bit innovative. She says maybe bitterly. But you aren't just like, hi, I had this dream. I'm writing it down. You've done research. You understand how this period works, how these processes work. You've met the people. I mean, you are, in fact, inventing your creating scenarios. But it's not like you're making this up at a whole cloth or something. No, absolutely not. Yeah, and I say that a little sheepishly. But yeah, it's true. I really did a lot of research. And at a certain point, I think, to help us connect with these moments, you have to bring some sort of, make something whole out of it, right? Otherwise, it just becomes scraps of documents and they make no sense. So I try to imagine the business of this lime industry, It's clearly cutthroat. People are. You know, one year a guy is in the roles of the Vatican and the next year he's off it. And you can see people buying up other people's kilns and sort of doing deals. So that it's clearly people are trying to make their way in a business. And so how do we tell that? How do we capture the feeling of the time and the energy and the drive and the priorities when you just have scraps? And this gets back to sort of our opening conversation, right? How do you recover past that otherwise would be lost? So that's I think there are many ways to do that. And I am glad to see historians being bolder in how they treat materials. I do have a lot of notes at the end if anyone wants to, you know, learn more and see kind of follow my my rabbit hole. You can do that. But I appreciate you saying that. And I think I do think it's important. I think it's important to push how we write history and try new things. And I do think it's important that we show our work. Let's let's put it that way if we do want to claim to be doing something that's not fiction, which this absolutely is not. Absolutely. You're very careful and you're very honest about what you're doing. But you know, I'm thinking like as right now it's impossible not to be thinking about AI and with, you know, like looking at the this when the conversation about AI is involving your your, you know, our fellow Midwesterner neighbor in Rome, the pope who is talking about like what is it that makes human artwork special? And it's you as someone who has done this work and has immersed them, you know, you know, you have learned about this. You've made it your life's work. You're in a position to write this that other people aren't and certainly a computer. You know, like this is, this is something you're you're able to do and it's not out of nowhere. And I think it's really important to note that like this, this spark of like creativity and humanity and expertise is, is all wound up here and it's it's good. It's a good thing. I get why you're sheepish, but like own it. Be proud. Yeah. Absolutely. I think another thing that I did in this book that was new for me and you'll appreciate this is a foreign historian of the early modern period is I did a lot of oral history work and and just and I, you know, I don't even think of that as it is that I think what is talking to people in the neighborhood. And that's another thing that a computer's not going to get that. He's not going to go in and talk to Elio Noda the bartender who's had a bar there for 40 years, right, who has seen everything come and go. He did I just call the computer he? Well, I guess I did it. Yeah. So just not only being more human, but having that sense of the breadth of who and what is is worth including and is worth thinking about. I think that is part of the creative activity as well, you know, thinking to look at the numbering on the door or the graffiti, you know, on the street. That doesn't classify as historical documentation in any kind of sense that I think a computer would pull on. So how can we as humans use our brains to expand what we look at and how we tell it? That absolutely I agree. That's that's a big part of what we do and what we can do. Yeah. We have we're we need to kind of wrap up in the interest of time I've taken loads of your time, but it's we can't leave Rome without talking about some churches. So that's just not possible. That's not what Rome's about. Is there one in particular you'd like to talk about? There are several on this block as you you will not be surprised to learn. Yeah. Do you have a favorite you'd like to talk about on the block? Yeah. I mean, I only focus on this block now, you know, but no, I'm willing to talk about any here. She want to talk about Santa Prasaday is Oh, I love that one. Well, the great church is San Clemente that have this layering that where you really see this layering. Anyone going to Rome go to San Clemente. This is always on my list too. I mean, you've never you won't see this is the layering. You just killed it. Absolutely. And it there's even a mithrayam down there too. You go aren't a pop. It is amazing. I'm one of the things that is so remarkable in Rome, of course, is just the density of churches and on this one block, there are two today and there are there are remains of others in in there as well. You know, one of the one of the churches is the Polish church and that's kind of interesting because I do wish in the book I had had more opportunity to talk about the many people who come to Rome. I mean, Rome is a a magnet for so many people and my story is pretty Roman. I mean, Valbus was from Spain and there's a huge Polish community on the block and that's that's fascinating too. And the Polish church was really generous with me and took me in and gave me lots of books in Polish that I couldn't read but the computer did help me with that. And and there's also a beautiful church called Santa Catherine I Funatti, which is Saint Catherine of the rope makers because the rope makers worked on this block. That's another vignette that I tell. And that church, I'm happy to say after many years, is slowly slowly being reopened for visitors. There's a beautiful painting by Amibola Kacchi inside and lots of other important altercases. So slowly this block, I think, which was really pretty decayed as I started approaching it as being rehabilitated and some of the spaces that have been closed off like this church are being reopened. And I want to say in that vein that the crypt of Albi Museum has been closed for a few years. I should say that for listeners who might think, hey, I want to go visit, it's promised to be reopened over the next year. And ideally, and very much in parallel with my book, they want to open some of the parts that tell more recent histories like histories of the 19th century and reopen some of the archaeological substrates like the Bakers, Chak and so forth. So people going to roam, look for the Crypt of Albi Museum and if it's not open, go back in a year or two. This is what it takes in Rome. It takes patients to find the address and to find things open, but well worth your while once it finally does reopen. Yeah, Italy takes patients. Italy, you just sit down and love what you get and that is that's what you got to do. It rewards it. It rewards it. All right, I think it's probably time to wrap up. That was it's been a minute, but thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation with you about what history can be. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure and I'm just delighted to have this conversation with you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com. Connect with us on Instagram and Blue Sky with the handle at new books network and subscribe to our weekly subscribe newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substract.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox. Our goal is to cure cancer. Not simply treat the symptoms. Choose us first at MD Anderson.org. What happens when you combine a cozy night in with the whole family in matching old Navy jingle jammies? It's a holiday moment of joy and the least for the time it takes a snap of picture. 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