Making Sense of R ome

This text explores how encounters with Rome relied on different senses, primarily smell and touch. Grand Tour studies usually prioritise literary and scholarly matters, and Rome as a place where sight takes precedence. Interactions based on smell and touch are in fact highly charged avenues for defining and expressing aspects of the city's experience (usually left out of modern accounts of earlier expectations of R ome), and what it amounted to once confronted as a physical site. Topics include: responses to St Peter's huge scale; perfume and odour; and walking in and touching Rome.