For artists and poets, the ‘Roman walk’ was a sublime experience, where the emulation of ancient splendour produced an inner catharsis. Meanwhile, for architects it became fertile territory for the imagination, where the accumulation of layers and objects provided the material for projecting a new city.
The eternal city appears as an interrupted dream, suspended in a time in which past and future have no sequence.
The perpetual presence of antiquity triggers a unique method to interpret and read history, inherent to the city itself: Rome allows no orderly succession of ‘rebirths’, no vanished civilizations. Rome privileges continuity. Ruins fascinate us because they return to their original, elemental nature: only form and only matter. The vestiges of ancient buildings sit outside the flow of events, exempt from their rules, therefore immortal.
Rome, as a monumental Wunderkammer, ‘city built in fragments’, ‘model of additive practice’, ‘atlas of affinities’, and ‘repertoire of analogies’ through a dialectical approach confronting history, theory, criticism, photography, cinema, and architecture, is archaeology in reverse, where it is the city itself that reassembles its own singular, disparate fragments, becoming the largest and most complex work of art in the world.
Authors
Nicola Braghieri, Elisa Boeri, Filippo Cattapan, Francesca Mattei, Giacomo Pala, Valter Scelsi.
Gaia Cambiaggi, Nadia Cannata, Paolo Carpi, Vasileios I. Chanis, Giusi Ciotoli, Pierre Coffy, Edina Eszenyi, Marco Falsetti, Angela Fiorelli, Luca Frepoli, Marianna Giannini, Emilia Giorgi, Leonie Groblewski, Micheal Groblewski, Margaret J.-M. Sönmez, Carole Lévesque, Juan López Cano, Jacqueline Maurer, Vincenzo Moschetti, Vittorio Pizzigoni, Florina Pop, Carlo Prati, Chiara Salari, Koenraad Vos, Maia W. Wellington Gahtan.
With images by Filippo Fanciotti and a photo essay by Anna Positano.
SECTION 1
Roma, machina analoga: Practices of montage amidst visions, ruins, and reconstructions
Nicola Braghieri
Fragments of the past: Assemblage of histories in early modern Rome
Francesca Mattei
The lesson of eighteenth-century Rome, or the city as a tautegory
Giacomo Pala
Rome by fragments: A brief analysis of the invention and ‘restauration’ of Antiquity between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Elisa Boeri
Fotocronache Romane: The representations of the city from urban to disciplinary metaphors
Filippo Cattapan
INTERMISSION
Hiding in Plain Sight
Anna Positano
SECTION 2
2.1 Promenades dans l’histoire : Rome as model
Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet
Michael Groblewski
An assemblage of techniques and motifs? Drawings of modern Rome on the back of Étienne Dupérac’s Vestigi dell’antichità di Roma
Luca Frepoli
Rome, eternal model for the invention of Milano Capitale (1797-1848)
Pierre Coffy
The power of an ancient sign: The Servian Walls and the Termini Train Station
Angela Fiorelli
Modus hodiernus: Typological transformations of the Seven Wonders of Ancient Rome
Giusi Ciotoli, Marco Falsetti
Baptising the past: The case of the Castel Sant’Angelo
Edina Eszenyi
Wandering in heterodoxy
Juan López Cano
2.2 Fragments of the past: Rome as museum
From urban incision to Fil Rouge: Via dei Fori Imperiali towards public space and narrative device
Florina Pop
Hyperrealism and imagination in Piranesi: The Prima Parte di Architetture e Prospettive as manifesto
Vittorio Pizzigoni
Wasteland-scape
Carole Lévesque
Reassembling fragments in the Vatican’s Museo Chiaramonti
Koenraad Vos
The Carcer Claudii X Viri and the Templum Pietatis: Fragments of Piranesi’s Campus Martius
Marianna Giannini
Forma Urbis
Paolo Carpi
The Diffuseum in Rome
Nadia Cannata, Maia Wellington Gahtan, Margaret J.-M. Sönmez
2.3 Analogy and display: Rome as machine
If machines could dream, they would want to forget: A contribution to memory studies in the digital age from a modern art-historical perspective
Leonie Groblewski
Acquaroma: Roman promenade at the time of the Anthropocene
Carlo Prati
Follow the Sun: The Estate Romana of Los Angeles ’84
Vincenzo Moschetti
From Rome to Las Vegas: Translating the vernacular in the architectural and photographic research of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown
Chiara Salari
Rome: A laboratory of unexpected nature
Emilia Giorgi, Gaia Cambiaggi
Rome as Roma: Exploring the idea of the ‘festive’ as a link between the spatial and cinematic representation
Vasileios I. Chanis
The city as context and pretext
Jacqueline Maurer
Endnote
Valter Scelsi
Biography
An Architect Out of Time
Resurgences of the Icon from the 15th Century to the Present Day
Edifici, città, paesaggi nei viaggi degli architetti francesi, 1750-1850
I disegni della Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati di Siena e i manuali d'architettura tra XVII e XVIII secolo
Fonti, questioni, ricerche tra XVII e XIX secolo
Bibliografia 1881-1934
architetto a Roma
From the Origins to Italy’s Capital
Rome, ombres et drapés au XVIIIe siècle
