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17 - A TALE OF TWO ROMES
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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WE BEGIN OUR PROCESS OF UNTANGLING THE MEDIEVALIZING OF ROME with two urban pendants, a pair of images: Rome as it was two or three generations after the Milvian battle, in the late fourth century, and Rome in the twelfth century – a long time in the life of any organism, not least a great city. The point is to show the general structure of late-antique and late-medieval Rome, and to ask the question, How did we get from A to B? With what process, speed, and purpose did the city progress, over eight centuries, to a point where untidy and exuberant urban scrub had penetrated and overgrown the grand order of the imperial capital, without however being able to obscure it entirely (Fig. 109)?
There are two ways of studying this contrast between late-antique and late-medieval images of Rome. One is common, and the humanist poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), known as Petrarch, was the first Renaissance writer to encourage it: to view the late-medieval city unfavorably against the ancient substance of the Constantinian city. His aim was political and propagandistic – to resurrect the notion of a resplendent classical Rome, which had been abused and belittled during the Middle Ages. He and later Renaissance writers assigned themselves the task of giving birth anew to this classical splendor. Medieval Romans themselves were not taken up with laments. It was their city and they lived in it, adjusting and reshaping, adding and curtailing, fitting it to their own lives. And that is the second way of looking at the contrast, to study the vital processes that led from the mighty metropolis of the Mediterranean to the different and equally viable city, the Seat of Peter. We must avoid the mistake of seeing the thousand years of medieval Rome as an unchecked slide from Trajanic or Hadrianic summits toward physical degradation and collapse. Our goal is to understand medieval Rome, not to condemn it.
How can we account for a city that during the fourth century was essentially whole but became disjointed, environmentally and socially – an assembly of more or less independent parts fortified and pitted against each other in the twelfth century?
13 - MAPPING, ZONING, AND SEQUESTRATION
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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MEASURING THE LAND IS AN ART ALMOST AS OLD AS HUMAN SETTLEMENT, and among ancient peoples the Romans were its masters. The voluminous surviving Roman literature on the subject pertains mostly to partitioning rural plots. However, by the mid-first century C.E. at least, the surveying techniques developed for that purpose were also being used to map the more convoluted and irregular landscapes of towns. The need for urban maps seems obvious today. They facilitate the design, construction, maintenance, and modification of the entire urban prospect and its infrastructure. They clarify legal status, and thus simplify revenue collection and adjudication of land disputes. They assist in keeping track of individuals and families; they help fire brigades and police do their jobs. For a census-driven urban bureaucracy such as Rome's, grounded in the identification and enrollment of a million people or more according to their property status, maps would seem not only warranted, but indispensable.
This commonsense proposition is not universally accepted, yet we are fortunate to have strong evidence supporting it. First and foremost, there is the Severan marble plan of the city. Probably a revision of a fire-damaged Flavian antecedent, it was affixed to a wall of the Templum Pacis around 203 C.E. or slightly later (see Fig. 49). About 10 percent of the original 1:246-scale planimetric map survives today in nearly 1,200 incised marble fragments fallen from the wall, which still stands, though entirely stripped of its accompanying enclosure and adornment (Fig. 86). An overpowering display of technical virtuosity, it is sometimes dismissed as a showpiece with purely rhetorical value like Agrippa's map of the known world in the Porticus Vipsania. Yet the use of maps for administrative purposes across the Roman world is well established. Vespasian's land cadasters at Orange, France, and a lost fragment of an aqueduct map from Rome marking private water concessions (Fig. 87), the second rendered schematically rather than planimetrically, were certainly derived from archival originals. Fragments of other marble maps survive, too, several on the same scale as the Severan plan and sometimes indicating the peripheral measurements of properties in Roman feet.
35 - A CITY TURNED INSIDE OUT
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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MUSSOLINI'S ARMY INVADED ETHIOPIA IN 1935 AND CLAIMED IT FOR the Fascist empire the following year. Envisioning a new Roman empire originating in Africa (Libya had been an Italian colony since 1911), he announced his intention to hold a universal exposition of art, science, and work at Rome – an “Olympics of Civilization.” Disregarding his 1931 piano regolatore, he chose a site south of Rome for the Esposizione Universale di Roma, or EUR ’42. This fairground, he vowed, would become the permanent nucleus of a new city, neither an extension of Rome nor its suburb. The Eternal City, it seems, was proving an eternal compromise. He wanted to build his ideal Fascist city from the ground up, and EUR ’42 was his opportunity. Partitioned on a rectilinear grid and transected by a broad cardo and decumanus, its orthogonal plan evoked an ancient Roman colony more than Rome itself. Rome's recolonization of the Mediterranean would begin here (Fig. 221).
Workers broke ground in 1937, but when Italy joined forces with the Nazis in 1940, the exhibition was canceled. By July 1943, when Allied forces bombed the outskirts of Rome, EUR ’42 had been abandoned. Two years on, Mussolini and Fascism had fallen. Construction recommenced in 1950, but far from being the monument that the posthumously dubbed “Sawdust Caesar” had envisioned, EUR (the name stuck, but not the date) became another Roman suburb, albeit one with grand aspirations.
Mussolini also oversaw three of Rome's largest urban propaganda projects in the 1930s – one each for sport, education, and entertainment. Confinedto Fascist Party members, these extravagant enclaves aimed to provide nearly self-sufficient, strictly controlled environments at varying distances outside the walls. Foro Mussolini, a “City of Sport,” opened in 1933. It housed the flagship school of Opera Nazionale Balilla, a national organization that molded ideal Fascist youths through rigorous sports programs. It was also an arena for massive spectacles exalting the regime. Mussolini hoped to stage the 1944 Olympics there as a capstone to EUR ’42. They too were canceled, but the dream came to oblique fruition when the venue, renamed Foro Italico, hosted the 1960 Olympics (Fig. 222).
33 - REVOLUTION AND RISORGIMENTO
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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AFTER NAPOLEON'S CRUSHING MILITARY DEFEAT AT WATERLOO, THE MAP OF Europe was redrawn at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), repatriating most of the Papal States to the Church. As a result, Pius VII returned to Rome and the monasteries were restored. A few years of fragile stability ensued; but waves of violent protest ushered in Pius IX's pontificate and lasted throughout it. Forced to flee Rome during a popular uprising in November 1848, Pius left the city without a government. In February 1849 local revolutionaries held popular elections and declared a new Roman Republic. In exile, the reactionary pope sought military help from French and Spanish troops; these launched an assault on Rome in April. Under the charismatic leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Revolutionary Army and hundreds of citizen-soldiers resisted until the end of June, when the French finally gained entry and restored Pius to Rome and his papal seat.
Faced with growing anticlerical sentiment, Pius devised social programs to help stave off local uprisings and embraced urban innovations to modernize Rome. Under his direction a group of advisers and private investors initiated public works projects. These included Rome's first gasworks and gas-lit street illumination, telegraph lines, three Tiber bridges, railroads, and a new aqueduct (Fig. 205). He sponsored housing projects, public fountains and laundries, schools, a new tobacco factory, and an asylum. He also dismantled the Jewish Ghetto's gates.
Nothing epitomized Machine Age modernity more than rail travel, which Pius embraced wholeheartedly. In the 1850s he initiated two passenger and freight lines connecting stations at Porta Maggiore and Porta Portese with a railroad suspension bridge across the Tiber linking via Ostiense to the left bank. The eastern station served both to receive incoming freight and to connect Romans to the countryside. The Porta Portese station emerged from a larger economic vision for Trastevere that included the tobacco factory, worker housing, and the restoration of Ponte Rotto with an iron suspension bridge.
During the 1860s Rome's urban development concentrated on the intramural eastern hills, home to vast estates of Pius IX's former military adviser, the wealthy prelate Francis De Mérode. He donated land in the ancient Castro Pretorio to Pius and then installed a new barracks, parade grounds, and exercise yards for the pope's 1,000 soldiers.
INTRODUCTION
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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THAT ROME, THE ETERNAL CITY, IS THE SUBJECT OF MORE SCHOLARLY inquiry than any other urban center in the world, past or present, should surprise nobody. Its importance was established early; its political power long predominated and the cultural residue of that power has endured. Its physical fabric, a sumptuous palimpsest, pleases the eye and rewards scrutiny. Its admirers have always been legion, and the presence of hundreds of institutes, libraries, museums, archives, study-abroad programs, archaeological digs, and foreign academies in the city ensures that Rome's unmatched capacity for regenerative grandeur will continue in perpetuo.
That Rome, the Eternal City, should never have received an urban biography spanning its three millennia of human occupation – that might suitably provoke surprise. Yet it is true. Perhaps those closest to the subject, knowing well the divine density and sheer amplitude of the city's flesh and blood, have avoided the long view for fear that even their best efforts would serve up a flavorless, skeletal carcass. After all, how many subjects, at the very minimum, must an urban historian broach? Politics, architecture, industry, commerce, trade, planning, infrastructure, demographics, geography, ecology, roads and connectivity, relations to the hinterland and other cities? Ideas, arts, salons, literary circles, and patronage networks? Crime, grime, gangs, poverty, invasion, flood, fire, famine, plague, and displacement? Should the city's past life be expressed as journalism, biography, documentary, or social, economic, intellectual, or political history?
“All of these things and more,” a conscientious scholar might reply, while looking urgently for the door. Rome may simply prove too big, venerable, and variable to confront over the longue durée. Authors have understandably preferred the periodic approach, privileging a single, cohesive historical era. In recent decades several fine studies have focused on Rome under various political leaders (Augustus, Hadrian, certain popes, Mussolini) or periods (prehistory, Republican or imperial Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Risorgimento, Fascism). Some are genuinely urbanistic in their approach – that is, they have sought to characterize the city as an organism that interacts intensively with the people it hosts. But others present Rome simply as a passive or indistinct venue of events – as a place that was great only because of the great individuals who animated it.
Dedication
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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4 - BIG MEN ON THE CAMPUS
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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IN JANUARY OF 52 B.C.E., A FANATICAL FOE OF THE ARISTOCRACY, PUBLIUS Clodius Pulcher, was murdered by a rival gang. The populist demagogue had recruited neighborhood and trade associations to pass his inflammatory legislation and enforce his violent tactics. His success relied not just on shrewd advocacy for the urban poor, but on an apparatus of neighborhood leaders whose patronage networks enabled mass mobilization of political gangs. Clodius’ final muster occurred at his funeral. His enraged followers cremated his body on a makeshift pyre at the Curia – the main one, on the Forum – which promptly went up in flames. The Comitium and its dependencies were also destroyed.
Apt symbol of the wreckage of the Roman state, the seat of government lay in ruins for four years. It fell to Julius Caesar to rebuild it during his dictatorship (48–44 B.C.E.). He did it on his own terms and at fabulous expense, seizing the opportunity to purchase private property just north of the Forum for a new rectangular civic temple enclosure, the Forum of Caesar. Land prices in this exclusive neighborhood, long an enclave of senatorial residences, were exorbitant. Out in the public area of the Comitium, the Rostra was detached from the Curia and placed roughly on the central axis of the short northwest end (Fig. 22). The Curia, now aligned with the old Forum's northeast side, anchored the south corner of the Forum of Caesar, the first of an eventual cluster of five “imperial fora” (Fig. 23). To look at, the new forum was not particularly original, being a hybrid of the temple cum portico already familiar on the Circus Flaminius and the colonnaded hillside temple precincts in famous sanctuaries around Latium. Even the notion of appending a curia to an enclosed portico had been anticipated in Pompey's alternate Senate chamber attached to his theater-portico complex. (Caesar's artful assassins would ensure that he himself fell in his fallen rival's curia, before a statue of Pompey.) The novelty resided in the forum's intended civic function – specifically, as a new kind of venue for law courts – and its profoundly dynastic cast. Pompey's patron goddess, Venus Victrix, had been something of an abstraction. Caesar's, Venus Genetrix, was by contrast known to everyone as the mother of the founder-hero Aeneas, whom the Julian clan claimed as a direct ancestor.
Index
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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1 - A BEND IN THE RIVER
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.
You could not step twice into the same river.
–HeraclitusWHATEVER THE GENEALOGY OF ROME'S GREATNESS, IT IS NOT PREMISED on geography. The city's physical advantages are undeniably significant, but hardly peremptory; when all is said and done, the natural setting seems a poor match for such a glorious destiny. Ancient Rome had no natural seaport and never dominated Mediterranean trade or transport in the manner of Carthage, Rhodes, Syracuse, or Alexandria. Nor did it command a fabulously fertile hinterland. It enjoyed no natural resources of note except clay, tolerably decent building stone, several small springs, and (we may presume) some quickly depleted timberland. Its hills were defensible but its valleys marshy or flood-prone. In its favor, Rome stood near the middle of the bustling Mediterranean basin at an important intersection of land routes and the Tiber, the largest and most navigable river in the region. This was an important, if hardly decisive, catalyst for the city's rise. The city occupies the lowest viable location for a major settlement in the river basin. Along its final run to the sea, the Tiber's banks are low, unstable, and prone to shifting during heavy floods. The ruins of Ostia, the ancient port town at the river's mouth 25 km below Rome, tell a cautionary tale: it was gradually buried in alluvium over time and its northern district was washed away by the sidewinding current.
Between Ostia and Rome, no bridge could have kept a grip on the river's wandering banks. Only inland – at the cluster of hills by which the world knows Rome – can some stability be found. Here the Capitoline, Palatine, and Aventine Hills are nested around the outer edge of an easterly elbow bend in the Tiber (Fig. 1). River bends tend to amplify into loops over time, but here the barrier of hills thwarts this tendency, providing a short zone of equilibrium that permits bridging. The loop contains a stable island as well, a rarity for the Tiber. Yet the island provides no advantages for a permanent crossing; in fact, the earliest recorded bridges of Rome, the wooden Pons Sublicius and the stone Pons Aemilius, were both downstream from it.
Map
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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30 - MAGNIFICENT PALACES AND RHETORICAL CHURCHES
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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NICHOLAS V'S DECISION TO MOVE THE PAPAL RESIDENCE TO THE VATICAN altered the city's political and cultural landscape. To reflect the new status of the Vatican palace, he enlarged and improved it to serve as his residence, an administrative center for papal business, and a reception space for visiting dignitaries. For defensive reasons he linked it to Castel Sant'Angelo with a wall called the Torrione. His successors further expanded the grounds to include the heights of the Vatican Hill, where Innocent VIII Cibò (1484–1492) later built a small villa, the Belvedere. Julius II linked the palace to the villa with two long wings around a central courtyard designed by Bramante, called the Cortile del Belvedere. Sixtus V divided this in half to house the Sistine Chapel and the Salone Sistina (Fig. 183).
Nicholas V's ministrations to Rome ensured that a citywide surge in palace and church construction would ensue. In fact, the boom lasted 200 years, until the mid-seventeenth century. Colossal palaces such as the Cancelleria and the Palazzo Farnese went up with remarkable speed in the abitato. In the Borgo, too, more important prelates, nobles, and cardinals erected palaces of varying grandeur to be near the center of papal power. For example, Via Alessandrina built by Alexander VI passed alongside one flank of Piazza Scossacavalli, where, with financial inducements to develop the area, two cardinals and a papal chamberlain had all built impressive palaces by about 1520 (Fig. 184). Additionally, Rome's elite undertook to acquire large vineyards and orchards on the intramural hills – but not for their agricultural assets. From the late sixteenth century these productive slopes, favored at last with aqueduct water, were repurposed into luscious villa gardens. The horti of antiquity had returned with a vengeance.
Christendom's most important church was now more than 1,100 years old and probably in physical distress; Nicholas V proposed to demolish it and to build an entirely new basilica. But only in 1505 did Julius II authorize a design competition for a new St. Peter's, which would gradually, after many fits and starts, grow up around its Constantinian ancestor and then, inevitably, consume it.
Works Cited
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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18 - THE ROME OF GOTHS AND BYZANTINES
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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BY AROUND 400, ROME ALREADY HAD THE BEGINNINGS OF AN AMBIVALENT environmental order, part classical and part medieval. There was a splendid urban frame accompanied by history, legends, and administrative apparatus. The Lateran now headed a system, distinct from the older one but symbiotic with it, comprising a network of parish churches each with its own clergy, and beyond the walls, cemeteries with their own important pilgrimage centers and suburban organisms. Much of this structure was in place by the fifth century.
Rome's imperial religious infrastructure had been largely neutralized: temples were decommissioned; cults suppressed; cult statues moved to public spaces to be regarded simply as art; and treasure, in part at least, removed. A marginal group, the Goths, had settled in Rome on the rundown edges of the Esquiline and Caelian Hills establishing their ecclesiastical tradition, Arianism, a fringe Christian sect considered heretical and often persecuted. The Jews may have been similarly concentrated, probably in the Transtiberim. Meanwhile Mithraism had closed shop and its places of worship had been abandoned or reappropriated for Christian use. The seeds of religious absolutism in a once-tolerant multifaith city were evidenced by the institution of an administrative structure as early as the mid-third century that divided Rome into seven ecclesiastical regions, whereby the Church was now organizing the entire city for its own purposes as if its assumption of civil jurisdiction were only a matter of time.
If Christianity was neutralizing or superseding polytheistic Rome's religious architecture, the same could not be said for the remaining pagan structures, including the imperial centers of government, which still functioned more or less as before. These were the Palatine; the Curia on the Forum and its dependencies, which had been the base of the Senate for a thousand years; and the offices of the urban prefecture, perhaps now in the Basilica of Maxentius, which had absorbed all the once-independent city services including the police, grain and oil distribution centers, and the water and public works commissions. Christian Rome needed this still-functioning administrative network as much as imperial Rome had. The Senate was now more concerned with the city's daily operation than with foreign policy. And since the imperial bureaucracy had left, a skeleton staff oversaw the once-bustling Palatine.
21 - THE LEONINE CITY: ST. PETER'S AND THE BORGO
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL TOPOGRAPHY OF ST. PETER'S HAVE changed dramatically since the medieval period. There is little left of the grand and ragged splendor of Constantine's basilica, though it survived the vicissitudes of a millennium and more. Nor is much left of the great pilgrimage quarter with the hostels, monasteries, national scholae, the old papal palace, small churches, and diaconiae that crowded the medieval Vatican quarter, known as the Borgo, around St. Peter's basilica. Relics of its physical form are sprinkled in unlikely places: the giant pinecone and peacocks that adorned the central fountain of the atrium now ornament Bramante's Belvedere in the palace grounds. The obelisk, a surviving fixture of Nero's circus, long remained in situ on the south flank of the basilica transept; now it centers Bernini's oval Piazza S. Pietro. Of the other familiar medieval landmarks, only the indestructible Mausoleum of Hadrian is still there (see Fig. 65), demilitarized into a museum and pleasure gardens, and connected to the Borgo by fragments of the Leonine Wall, like some defanged but noble beast on a leash (Fig. 130). Yet despite all the changes, a pilgrim transported from the Middle Ages would have no problem recognizing the pervasive cult of St. Peter and his shrine, the foremost, if not the only, reason for the long, involved development and life of an entire urban region. Few manmade places in the world have more obsessively clung to the sustaining principles of a place of veneration in perpetuity.
To envision the medieval city at the Vatican, the Burgus Sancti Petri, or the Civitas Leonina of the documents, we must do several things: situate Constantine's church in the context of the built and natural environment of antiquity and its subsequent crowning with a string of dependent buildings; examine the development of the Vatican Palace before it was submerged under Renaissance forms; and unearth the urban history of the Borgo itself.
The Vatican and the Lateran were medievalized in distinct ways. For one thing, even if parts of the Vatican were developed under Caligula and Nero and were included in the regionary catalogs, the district retained a suburban character. The emperor Aurelian felt no need to enclose any part of it when he speedily threw up his wall around the city.
10 - CRISIS AND CONTINUITY
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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THE QUIET REIGN OF FAUSTINA'S HUSBAND, ANTONINUS PIUS (138–161), HAS been characterized, rightly or wrongly, as an Elysium of stability and prosperity. That of his adopted successor, Marcus Aurelius (161–180), troubled by pandemics, barbarian invasions, and economic difficulties, epitomizes crisis and reaction. Yet at Rome, evidence of this contrast – whether drawn from historical accounts, cemetery data, building projects, or inscriptions – is mostly invisible. Under these two Antonine rulers the city suffered few discernible systemic difficulties. Pius built sparingly – his most famous works were temples, one for the deified Hadrian in the Campus Martius and one for his deified wife, and ultimately for himself, on the Forum. Marcus and his son and coemperor Commodus (177–192) built even less; but inscriptions throughout their successive reigns signal a fairly healthy and robust city life. That is not to say that decline did not occur; we simply cannot detect it. And while it is true that Rome was propped up economically with subsidies and other artificial inducements, it would be naïve to presume that a notorious plague that ravaged the empire between about 165 and 180 took no toll here. Nevertheless, the great age of urban expansion was over. Rome would again witness bursts of urban creativity and renewal, but those episodes gradually devolved into a zero-sum game of certain finite physical resources such as water, marble, and granite. By the early fourth century few monumental structures were built without ransacking others.
Some imperial marble quarries were closed during the plague, but the marble yards at Portus and Rome may have been adequately stocked to cushion the blow. Indices of a falloff in building activity we have in abundance: fewer new buildings, fewer dated brick stamps, no new aqueducts for a century after 109. A Trajanic river wharf at the Emporium specializing in building stone seems to have been derelict by the century's end (see Fig. 89). None of these things remotely signals urban decline; Rome had simply reached a saturation point of development. Not coincidentally, for eight decades after 110 there were no citywide fires to whet an emperor's appetite for intervention. It was an appropriate time to take stock. Around 175 or shortly thereafter, Marcus and Commodus expanded the old customs boundary established a century earlier to align it more with Rome's built-up area (see Chapter 13).
22 - VIA PAPALIS, THE CHRISTIAN DECUMANUS
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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AS THE CROW FLIES, ABOUT FIVE KILOMETERS SEPARATE THE VATICAN AND the Lateran – a long walk and a considerable distance on horseback. The spiritual energy flowing between them created an unlikely Christian decumanus, a major east–west street that now rivaled the ancient north–south cardo defined by Via Flaminia/Appia. To the medieval Roman and the foreign pilgrim this was the ultimate ceremonial path, Christian Rome's triumphal way. It conjured images of dazzling processions led by pontiffs and crowned heads of state, eventfully traversing the city with meaningful stops and attendant ritual. Processions such as the papal possesso, a ritual walk to the Lateran taken by the newly crowned pope, began at St. Peter's (Fig. 135). From there one moved down the length of the porticoed Via Cornelia toward the Tiber with the somber bulk of Hadrian's Mausoleum as the first beacon; across Pons Aelius, and through the Campus Martius, with pagan landmarks and Christian stations to the right and left, to the foot of the Capitoline; then skirting it along the north and east to enter the Roman Forum; passing through it to the crest of the Velia at the southeast end, where the Arch of Titus stood and opened the way down the slope to the Colosseum; and up again, to the top of the Caelian and the sprawling and spirited complex of the Lateran.
This was Via Lateranensis, Via Papalis, Via Maior: as close to an organizing central axis as medieval Rome ever had. But it was no triumphal route in the formal sense. Were it not for the power of processions to fashion continuity and cohesiveness through ceremonial movement, it would be seen for what it really was, a string of neighborhoods and a patchwork of streets of different width and indifferent rectitude, going uphill and down, and flanked by everything from rows of unassuming houses or yard walls to the still-proud marble frames of ancient theaters, monumental monasteries, and parish churches. It was no cardo or decumanus in the Roman sense. Via Papalis was not, in other words, the initial organizing determinant of the course of urban order, but the unanticipated and improvised reaction to the pull of two far-flung ceremonial centers.
7 - THE CONCRETE STYLE
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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Summary
AUGUSTUS’ SUCCESSOR, TIBERIUS (14–37 C.E.), SPONSORED ONLY A FEW urban developments in Rome, the most significant being the expansion of the imperial Palatine compound into the Domus Tiberiana, a genuine palace designed to accommodate the growing imperial entourage, especially the Praetorian Guard. Other cohorts of the guard were quartered in a full-scale military camp, the Castra Praetoria, just northeast of the Servian Wall; this was later nested into the Aurelian Wall (see Fig. 80). Caligula (37–41) launched several aggressive building campaigns, some of which died prematurely with their patron. Others were completed by his successors. Claudius (41–54) focused on infrastructure rather than the city's monumental core. The splendid Porta Maggiore, doubling as an aqueduct arcade and a city gate, is his most enduring monument in Rome (Fig. 38). Over it flowed his two great aqueducts, one channel stacked upon the other: the Aqua Claudia and the Anio Novus above, both begun by Caligula. Their arcade of solid peperino stone still dominates the landscape east of the city. Together they augmented the existing water supply by as much as 40 percent. Claudius devised no known monumental baths, water play, or naumachia to justify or advertise them. Yet combined, Frontinus later tells us, the two lines were supplying all 14 city regions from 92 distribution tanks in his time (ca. 97 C.E.). In number, these tanks constituted 37 percent of the total urban network, and in volume 34 percent; the total brought in an astounding (but in Frontinus’ opinion, scandalously underperforming) 333 million liters per day.
This precious glimpse of Rome's “soft” structure at one moment in its history says little about its “hard” aspect, however. After Augustus, the first traceable and truly systemic changes to the urban fabric belonged to Nero (54–68), who took concrete vaulted architecture not only to new heights of creativity, but also into mass production. The central-Italian preference for concrete as a monumental building material developed slowly and incrementally. Writing early in Augustus’ reign, Vitruvius provided a simple formula for this miraculous slurry that hardened into veritable stone, far stronger than any mortar. Its key ingredients were chunks of stone aggregate and a matrix of water, slaked lime, and pozzolana – a volcanic sand that gives concrete its extraordinary strength.
34 - ITALIAN NATIONALISM AND ROMANITÀ
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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- Rome
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- 05 July 2016
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- 07 September 2016, pp 324-335
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Summary
PIUS IX AND KING VITTORIO EMANUELE II BOTH DIED IN 1878. QUIETLY interred at St. Peter's, Pius was largely unmourned while the king received a hero's burial at the Pantheon. Almost immediately, a national monument embodying the aspirations and intentions of the new nation was proposed in his honor. The still-unratified 1873 master plan had not anticipated such a monument, so the contentious task to choose a site remained. After several false starts, a design was selected to crown the symbolically potent Capitoline Hill facing Palazzo Venezia. In the abstract, the monument, known as the Altare della Patria, the Altar of the Fatherland, enjoyed wide popularity. Yet once construction began in 1885 the shock of its gargantuan size, bright white surfaces, inappropriate site, and disregard for the urban fabric stirred resentment. Cultural critics delighted in vilifying it long before its inauguration on 4 June 1911, the 50th anniversary of Italian unification. Quite apart from its aesthetic extremes, it was jammed too tightly into the medieval and Renaissance neighborhoods surrounding the hill, narrowing local streets and exacerbating traffic just as motorized transit was beginning to burden the city's infrastructure (Fig. 212). And it set in motion actions and reactions with far-reaching consequences. Traffic was diverted around it, and this entailed a complete rearrangement of Piazza Venezia, which now functioned as a prologue to the monument, and became, along with the Palazzo Venezia on its west side, the “ritual nucleus” of modern Rome.
During the liberal administration of Mayor Ernesto Nathan, a new piano regolatore was ratified in 1909. Called the Sanjust Plan after its developer, Edmondo Sanjust di Teulada, it focused, as did earlier plans, on traffic intervention. But there were important innovations, too. Its new planning area, enclosed by a proposed urban expansion ring road, included the Roman Campagna immediately outside the walls; it displayed topographic contours for the first time; it expanded and defined new public transit lines; it described a rudimentary zoning plan with three types of housing, fabricanti (multifamily midrise), villini (low-rise), and giardini (luxury garden residences) linked to specific neighborhood development plans; and it identified specific locations for public parks and open space (Fig. 213).
Acknowledgments
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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- Rome
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Frontmatter
- Rabun Taylor, University of Texas, Austin, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, University of California, Berkeley, Spiro Kostof, University of California, Berkeley
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- Rome
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- 05 July 2016
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- 07 September 2016, pp i-iv
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