The catalogue accompanies the exhibition presented in two venues of the Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo and Crypta Balbi, from December 14, 2018 to April 7, 2019. Starting from the story of Giovanni Volpato (artist, engraver, antiquarian and entrepreneur), active in Rome in the second half of the 18th century), the exhibition recounts the tastes, forms and fashions of antiquity, from the Classical age until the present, passing through the heyday of the Grand Tour, when the taste for souvenirs was born. The critical essays reveal the relevance of the classic in the 18th and 19th centuries. They recall the cultural coteries of the time, the development of public collections of archaeology, the centres of production of souvenirs, from lithographs to paintings and ceramics, and analyse the concept of “artist”, in Greece and contemporaneity.