Few cities wear their history so openly as Rome: walking its streets, you step between millennia, from ancient forums to Renaissance piazzas, Baroque fountains to the bleak constructions of Mussolini's Fascist regime. Nowhere else do we have such a continuous picture of how a city evolved – and how its people lived – across two and a half thousand years.

In The Shortest History of Rome, Matthew Kneale explores how a group of hill settlements grew to become the capital of the ancient world and then reinvented itself as the spiritual capital of Christendom, before enduring the tumult of the twentieth century. No city has been reborn so many times. Sacked by Visigoths, rebuilt by popes, occupied by Napoleon, and eventually the capital of a unified Italy – Rome has outlasted every force that sought to define or destroy it.

Veering from the heroic to the tragicomic, Rome's history illuminates the history of humanity itself.

'Matthew Kneale has produced the perfect guide for anyone trying to make sense of the multi-layered history and archaeology of Rome. Lucid, lively and deeply informed, it gives us Rome's monuments, historical stratifications and dazzling personalities – emperors, popes and artists – with intelligence and infectious enthusiasm.' —Ross King, author of The Shortest History of Italy and The Shortest History of Ancient Rome