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The wealth of source material produced by Roman notaries has long been neglected. Only in recent decades has it been systematically evaluated by researchers. Given the fragmentary source situation in general, these atti notarili add considerable detail to our knowledge of everyday life. They provide insights not only into the Rome of the popes, which has received considerable attention, but above all into the Rome of the Roman people, much less studied. This paper focuses not on another notary, but on the question of the potential contribution of this genre of sources to the history of late medieval Rome. We see how clients belonging to different social groups approach different notaries. We understand the typical concerns and problems of Roman society, ranging from the debtor imprisoned in a dungeon to the Colonna family in their palazzo. We find confident Florentines with their business dealings, German bakers and their partnership contracts, impoverished monasteries with their growing debts. We see the building boom of the Renaissance and how Piazza Navona is transformed from a campus into a platea, as well as rural Rome within the walls and its countless vineyards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

„Not without merit“. This is how Theodor Mommsen described the most important historical work by Ferdinand Gregorovius, the „History of Rome in the Middle Ages“ before going on to add critically „but he has too much imagination“. This paper reflects on the historian Gregorovius’s openly declared relationship with the imagination, the close affinity between history and poetry. It describes the peculiar role, which we could perhaps describe as that of an outsider, of an author forced to write his books as an independent scholar, funding them mainly with his work as a journalist. Using Gregorovius‘s direct experience of the enchanted gardens at Ninfa, which attracted him as an author of lyric poetry and as an explorer of the historical landscape, we examine some case studies of the genesis of the narrative form that he developed and discuss it as a challenge to historicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]