Tells the story of urban life through people's bodily experience; how women and men moved, what they saw and heard, how they dressed, when they bathed and how they made love, in the spaces of the city from ancient Athens to modern New York. The author of this book explains why our civilization has had such trouble making a home for the human body. In a chronological survey which takes in Hadrian's Rome and medieval Paris, Renaissance Venice and E.M. Forster's London, he asks how the dignity of physical experience can be affirmed, today, though understanding of the past.