{"product_id":"smoke-and-rubble-how-romes-most-infamous-slum-survived-on-corruption-cookfire-and-catastrophe-9798196573804","title":"Smoke AND Rubble: How Rome's Most Infamous Slum Survived on Corruption, Cookfire, and Catastrophe","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): J. D. Halcourt\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: Ancient - Rome\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eShe had eight seconds.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom the moment she smelled smoke to the moment she understood the staircase below her was already burning, a freedwoman on the third floor of a Subura insula had eight seconds to make a decision. The door handle was hot before she touched it. The timbers of the building - unseasoned pine, mortared with cheap lime, built to last seven years and already in its ninth - made the choice for her.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is not the Rome you were taught.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSmoke and Rubble\u003c\/i\u003e strips away the marble to find the city underneath: six-storey tenements packed with forty people to a floor, streets so narrow two carts could not pass, and a landlord class that calculated - correctly - that rebuilding after a fire cost less than fireproofing a building before one. For three quarters of Rome's population, this was not the backdrop to history. It was the whole of life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing on Juvenal's savage street dispatches, the building codes of Augustus and Nero, the fire-investigation records of the Vigiles, and the latest archaeology from the Esquiline slopes, historian and forensic investigator J.D. Halcourt applies a new analytical tool - the \u003cb\u003eSmoke \u0026amp; Collapse Autopsy\u003c\/b\u003e - to the question Rome's own historians avoided asking: was the Subura's chronic catastrophe an accident of poverty, or an engineered outcome?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe answer moves from a cracked balcony beam in 44 BC to the cladding on a west London tower block in 2017. The structural logic is the same. The people who paid for it never owned the building.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eSmoke and Rubble\u003c\/i\u003e is for readers of Mary Beard's \u003ci\u003eSPQR\u003c\/i\u003e, Kyle Harper's \u003ci\u003eThe Fate of Rome\u003c\/i\u003e, and anyone who has ever looked at a city and wondered who it was actually built for.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Independently Published","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47892740702359,"sku":"9798196573804","price":1245.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9798196573804.webp?v=1781188613","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/smoke-and-rubble-how-romes-most-infamous-slum-survived-on-corruption-cookfire-and-catastrophe-9798196573804","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}