Con la luce di Roma. In Rome’s Light examines Rome through photographs made between 1840 and 1870, drawing on the Marco Antonetto Collection and the photographic holdings of Villa Vela. Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2015, the book accompanies an exhibition at the Museo Vincenzo Vela and presents the early history of photography in Rome not as a single stylistic progression, but as a field of competing purposes and ways of seeing.
Its subject is the city’s “vedute”—views that became the defining form of Roman photography in the decades that followed. The selection moves from the first experiments with daguerreotypes and paper negatives to the emergence of professional studios and the production of image sets intended for an international market. Rome appears here simultaneously as a site of scientific inquiry, artistic aspiration, study, commerce, personal pleasure, and curiosity. That range gives the book its particular historical intelligence: the city is not merely depicted, but shaped by the motives of those who photographed it and by the audiences who learned to recognize it through images.
The collection is consequently best understood as a multi-photographer historical record rather than the work of a single author. Its value lies in the comparison of photographic procedures, uses, and attitudes toward the same urban environment. For collectors concerned with the formation of photographic culture, this is a substantial documentary and editorial resource, bringing together the technical beginnings of the medium with the social life of its circulation.
The 256-page bilingual Italian-English volume includes 231 colour illustrations and is issued as a 22 × 29 cm softcover with flaps. Its generous scale supports close attention to the photographs while preserving the coherence of an exhibition-based argument. The book’s significance rests in that balance between historical survey and visual specificity: it shows how early photography made Rome legible, repeatable, and widely imaginable.
