Published by Knopf in 1992, Joel Sternfeld’s *Campagna Romana: The Countryside of Ancient Rome* examines a storied landscape south and east of Rome that has long occupied a central place in European cultural memory. Historically celebrated by writers such as Horace, Goethe, and Henry James, and rendered on canvas by painters including Claude, Turner, and Corot, the rolling plain around the Claudian Aqueduct survived for centuries in pastoral desolation. Sternfeld turned his color photography toward this terrain at a pivotal moment, examining how centuries of architectural remnants coexist with late twentieth-century development.

Sternfeld’s photographs frame poignant confrontations between deep history and rapid modern expansion. Ancient tombs, temples, ruined villas, and aqueduct arches stand in direct visual tension with modern apartment complexes, shopping centers, railway infrastructure, and encroaching suburban sprawl. Rather than presenting an idealized arcadia, the work documents a fragile, endangered environment on the periphery of Rome, where proposals for an archaeological park contended with unregulated urban development.

Featuring essays by Richard Brilliant and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., this 129-page hardcover publication provides critical historical and art-historical frameworks for Sternfeld’s visual survey. For photobook collectors and scholars of landscape photography, *Campagna Romana* stands as a significant body of work that extends the tradition of classical landscape representation into a rigorous, contemporary document of ecological and archaeological vulnerability.