Almuzara brings to light the “never seen” Roman Córdoba with the publication of a luxurious book

The history of Córdoba is a testament to how strategic location and careful planning can turn a city into an epicenter of civilization and power in the Roman Empire. But the legacy he left and the importance he had has been hidden from the city itself centuries later. Contemporary Córdoba has looked more at the Muslim legacy and has forgotten the importance it had as the capital of Baetica.

That injustice, that grievance, is what he has tried to alleviate Manuel Pimentel the editor and president of Almuzara with an ambitious publication of 544 pages and 4 kilos of weight, created with great luxury both in the design and in the treatment of texts and images and which has been written by the Professor of Archeology Desiderio Vaquerizo. Roman Cordoba. The hidden city It is “the book of this decade.” This is how a happy Manuel Pimentel defined it this Monday at the lunch that the publisher has organized with those responsible for the local media for a preview presentation of the work, which will have its debut next Thursday, the 20th, at the Friendship Circle.

An act that has had Eugenio Sánchez Ramade. Without the patronage of his companies 12 PB and Espirea (and the interest that history and archeology arouses in the businessman) Manuel Pimentel has confessed that the publication and profitability of a work of these characteristics, which has a price of 150 euros. It is not just any book because the objective, Pimentel has insisted, is to discover ‘the hidden Córdoba’ which is none other than the capital of Hispania Ulterior during the Roman Republic, and later capital of Baetica during the Roman Empire.

Desiderio Vaquerizo has pointed out that this book is a synthesis of the work of many people over forty years, “because 40 years ago Roman Córdoba was not known. “Practically nothing was known about her.” A book that according to the author is conceived from a double perspective. On the one hand, offering the city “a tool, a vademecum that did not exist». Vaquerizo maintains that the city lives focused on the Islamic era and boasts of that period, but that “in some way it denies its Roman period”, to which we must add the heritage losses, “of not having anything from the Roman era to show or to put in our mouths. “The little that there is is abandoned, it is in the process of reconstruction or destruction.”

The second objective of this publication is, according to the archeology professor, claim the hidden citythat Córdoba “that seems to have never existed and that is at the base of everything. Because they were the ones who defined urbanism, who really created and consolidated the image of the city and who laid the basis not only for its street map, but also for its institutions, their language, everything else.

The book, very careful, has graphic material of the first magnitude» with «field» photographs, if the site no longer exists or is hidden and with «state-of-the-art infographics».