The Roman Retail Revolution

By Steven J. R. Ellis,

Book cover of The Roman Retail Revolution: The Socio-Economic World of the Taberna

Book description

Tabernae were ubiquitous in all Roman cities, lining the busiest streets and dominating their most crowded intersections in numbers far exceeding those of any other form of building. That they played a vital role in the operation of the city, and indeed in the very definition of urbanization in ancient…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Roman Retail Revolution as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I adore this book because it explains the development of streets lined with shops that we see in Pompeii and identifies this phenomenon as a key development in the Roman empire. Steve shows that shops develop as part of the façade to what were houses of the elite in the second century BCE, but then proliferate in the towns of Italy. Ultimately, he shows how shops also spread to the towns of the provinces. The implications for a fundamental change in urban life were immense. The book is full of archaeological data and painstaking study, which is concisely presented to…

From Ray's list on the archaeology of Roman Italy.

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