The Roman views of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) have lost none of their power over the last two centuries. Their longevity derives from the formidable artistic skills lavishly displayed in Piranesi’s thousands of etchings, bolstered by his architectural training and informed appetite for archaeological detail. In part, too, as David Watkin remarks in his recent study The Roman Forum, Piranesi benefits from fortunate timing. Because he was depicting the city before the widespread excavations and reconstructions that began in the nineteenth century, “any ancient building he shows we can take as genuinely ancient.”¹ The images of half-buried monuments, integrated with churches and street life and picturesque rural incursions, are compelling documents of a great city in an era when the study of antiquity was fueling the contradictory aesthetic revolutions of neoclassicism and Romanticism. At the same time, they transcend their immediate circumstances to become definitive expressions of the “grandeur that was Rome.” Exhibitions such as “The World of Piranesi,” a recent collaborative project between faculty and students at the University of Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art, continue to promote discussion about Rome’s architectural heritage and imaginative legacy.