The best selling Finnish Canadian?

If you listened to the coverage of the last election of a new pope on CBC or NPR you heard on several occasions a resident He was a Finnish Canadian, Anthony Majanlahti, 40. Whatever the pronunciation was, the name probably had no Finnish connotation. But he is a Finnish Canadian, now also a Finnish citizen and a contemporary Roman. His book "The Families who made Rome" has sold in all some twenty thousand copies, in English and in Italian, and there will be more languages soon.

Why Rome in the first place?
-I am a social historian, I am interested in understanding how people interacted with each other, Anthony Majanlahti explains. - How people solved differences, got along with each other, and Rome is perfect for that. -And also Rome is very beautiful, he adds.
- I started as an undergraduate doing work in Renaissance studies, came to Rome first for research of the English speaking Rome. And came back in 1999 and to work at the English Academy, a British research center in Rome. I was involved in researching a small part of Rome, throughout its history. It was a small project geographically, but a large one in terms of time.
At that phase, something of a coincidence happened. Anthony Majanlahti met an English couple interested in Roman history. They met again the following day for lunch, and in the end the elderly couple, apparently not cash strapped, offered to finance a book about Rome.
- They offered a room in their summer apartment in Rome for me to live in, and I stayed there for four years, explains Anthony Majanlahti.

The book has now appeared in several editions in hard cover and soft cover. It has now been printed in two editions in Italian, and is being translated into Portuguese, for the market in Brazil...
But notinto Finnish, I note..
-I would love to see it in Finnish, but that all depends on publishers. The rights are for sale at places such as the Frankfurt book fair. But someone has to make an offer.
The book is selling well:
- In English the book has sold so far about eleven thousand copies, in Italian it is also reaching that amount, and keeps selling well. - For this kind of history guide book it is doing very well. I expected myself that it would sell perhaps five thousand. In North America the book is basically an import.
Anthony Majanlahti is connected with the Finnish cultural scene in Rome, a frequent guest at Finnish Embassy receptions and other occasions. But there has been little contact with Finland at the academic level.
There is actually a rich tradition of Finnish research of ancient Rome. Earlier associated with people such as Gunnar Suolahti, one of the modern researchers in Päivi Setälä, with accent on social history and women in particular.
Anthony Majanlahti takes up from the reference to women’s history. - It is not widely known that half of the major monuments in Renaissance Rome were built and paid for by women. - I am constantly surprised with the role of women in Roman history.
- I am interested in all periods, I am trying to fill all gaps in my knowledge, but my research has dealt with the Renaissance and Barock, mainly 1450 to 1700, he says, but goes on to talk about a interest in writing a guide book about medieval Rome. - It is still present here. The city may be wearing barock clothes from later periods, but medieval Rome is underneath, and easily available.

What then are, in your opinion, the popular fallacies about Rome? Knowledge in Canada must be superficial, but even here in Italy perhaps..

- Oh, the Italians themselves know next to nothing, they are always surprised to learn new things. There is a huge hunger in Italy for this type of research. Actually, I would like t o popularize more of the past. I think such work could actually be more important that original research.

Rome was
not devastated

-Most people tend to think that Rome is in ruins, because the Barbarians when they arrived knocked everything down. Of course, this is not true at all. -When people invade a town, they are not interested in knocking down buildings. What brought down ancient Roman buildings were two things, earthquakes and the Romans themselves. Stone material from old buildings was used to build new ones. They cannibalized their old buildings. Old temples were converted into nunneries. And they took marble and burnt it to make new decorations. Marble actually burns, and that is something most people do not know. The Romans did know it, and that was why they built huge walls around their public places. Thus, when fires hit the residential areas behind the walls, there was no risk that the public building would be destroyed. When Rome fell into decline, the public buildings were soon in disrepair.. There was no use for the buildings and they could even be dangerous. The only rational solution was to break them up and use the material.
- How then an empire of that size had survived so long as it did - with an economy based on military expansion only... It was a kind of pirate empire, based on taking new territories. It was not based on agriculture, it was relied on expansion only. And when that expansion was no longer possible, it could not survive.
-There was pressure on Rome from the East, from groups like the Huns. And that created solid cultural elements that were not Roman, within the Empire, and they could function as an opposition. That process took around two hundred years. When the Empire finally fell in the West, what really happened, was that basically the government changed. The old rulers were sent away and a new gothic elite took its place. (In 476, the Western Roman Empire in Italy was overthrown, when Odoacer deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus and declared himself rex Italiae).- It was a tribal government, and when the first German king of Italy assumed power he sent imperial regalia, such as the crown, to Constantinople saying they did not need that any more. And the last teenage emperor was forced to resign and enter a monastery. Even he was not killed. “The Empire fell with a whimper, not with a bang...”

ISBN: 9781844134090, paperback. Publisher: Random House. Published in 2006. A hard cover edition is available as well.