Welcome to Bill Thayer's Web Site
where you will find:

LacusCurtius: a major site on Roman antiquity, including a photogazetteer of Roman and Etruscan cities and monuments (with a very large site on the city of Rome of course); a site for teaching yourself to read Latin inscriptions; the complete Latin texts of Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Quintus Curtius' Histories of Alexander the Great, the Saturnalia of Macrobius, and Censorinus' de Die Natali; Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, the Historia Augusta, Claudian, Frontinus, Vitruvius, Celsus, and Cato's de Re Rustica in both Latin and English; complete English translations of Polybius, Cassius Dio, Dio Chrysostom, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Appian's Civil Wars and Quintilian; Rodolfo Lanciani's book Pagan and Christian Rome, Christian Hülsen's book on the Roman Forum, Bury's 2‑vol. History of the Later Roman Empire, Bevan's House of Ptolemy, 4 books on Roman Britain, George Dennis's Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria; Platner and Ashby's Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (nearly complete) and most of Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities; a fair amount of Plutarch and Ptolemy's Geography; some maps of the Roman Empire, and lots more.

[ 10/4/08: 2907 pages, 690 photos,
676 drawings & engravings, 118 plans, 66 maps ]

[ 8/1/08: 9129 pages of print, presented in 576 webpages;
311 photos, 171 maps, 117 engravings and other illustrations
including 16 full-length books ]

After September 11, like many other Americans, I found myself drawn to the history of my own country; and as my small wartime contribution, I started an American History site, which has turned into one of the larger ones on the Web. A large section on Louisiana and Freeman's biography of Robert E. Lee are joined by the journal of a Mormon pioneer, a book on Washington's presidency, two books on the Spanish in America, a contemporaneous account of the Baltimore Riot of 1812, a book on the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, another on early‑19c Illinois, the log kept by the Spanish commander at the siege of Pensacola in 1781, some material related to West Point, journal articles on a variety of subjects, and other items. More is on its way.

My Gazetteer of Italy — currently a few hundred mostly non-Roman pages of churches, frescoes, etc. — is my own favorite part of the site. Since 2003, I've mostly been adding to the Churches of Italy section, which currently (4/6/08) covers 619 churches in 370 pages and 1390 photos; plus, quite separately, three entire books on the churches of Rome, covering about 900 of them, past and present, in great detail. (The merest drop in a bucket, by the way: Italy's churches present and past must number at least 500,000.)

The United States, my home, I know far less well than I do Italy: for one thing, it's a much larger country. My American Scrapbook for now — 8/8/06 — is mostly about Kentucky (in particular the little town of Jenkins), with a bit of Chicago.

Also, a few loose ends that will eventually be better organized:

[ 6/30/06: 330 pages, 741 photos ]

About 16 months' worth of my diary. Nothing terribly titillating, really; but it's the laid-back section of this website (read: "easy to put online"), and is the raw material for much of the Gazetteer. A bit of London, France, and Kentucky, and lots of Italy: Rome, Milan, Tuscany, Umbria and the Marche, large tracts of which I explored on foot, so that the diary includes details that could be useful if you're planning a trip or a bike tour. Illustrated with photos not usually found elsewhere onsite, cross-linked to Gazetteer pages and external sites, and lavishly supplied with Google maps, it's also partly indexed by place and topic.

In a similar vein, eight Letters from Colombia written in 1993.