"Focusing on images and descriptions of movement and spectacle - everyday street activities, congregations in market piazzas, life in the Jewish ghetto and the plague hospital, papal and other ceremonial processions, public punishment, and pilgrimage routes - Rose Marie San Juan uncovers the social tensions and conflicts within seventeenth-century Roman society that are both concealed within and prompted by mass-produced representations of the city.

These depictions of Rome - guidebooks, street posters, broadsheets and brochures, topographic and thematic maps, city views, and collectible images of landmarks and other famous sights - redefined the ways in which public space was experienced, controlled, and utilized, encouraging tourists, pilgrims, and penitents while constraining the activities and movements of women, merchants, dissidents, and Jews."--BOOK JACKET.