Memory and Movement in the Roman Fora from Antiquity to Metro C, JSAH 73.4 (2014) 478-506 (original) (raw)
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The Architectonics of Memory: Space, Power, and Identity in Contemporary Rome
Annali d'Italianistica, 2019
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What is heritage? What are the boundaries of heritage? What is required to call something 'heritage'? In this paper, I reflect on heritage as a concept that is interrelated with the concept of memory and I examine a recent example of creating heritage: the Flower pot of Blenheim Palace. Then, I continue to reflect on some challenges in urban development in Rome.
Marching into Rome: The Gateway to the Eternal City
California Italian Studies 13, 1, 2024
The entrance zone to Rome has, for millennia, been the setting for entries and marches, welcomed or contested. It is a symbolic precinct, and a palimpsest of toponyms, extant or remembered, connected with Augustus, Constantine, Pope Leo X Medici, and Mussolini. Drawing on new material from private archives, this article traces the interwar development of this zone, revealing an unknown story of the synergy among several projects: the restoration of Villa Madama (Raphael’s villa and papal welcoming center for the Medici), the coeval construction of the neighboring Foro Mussolini, and the siting nearby of the Palazzo Littorio (conceived as the Fascist Party Headquarters but subsequently realized as the Foreign Ministry). Fascist planners conceived this forum as a new gateway to Rome, and a staging ground for Fascist ideology and mass spectacle. It emerges that Raphael’s villa was a significant node of the plans; its site, form, function, and symbolism were tied to the forum, which grew to englobe the villa and the Ministry palace within a verdant park. Moreover, the appropriation of the so-called Renaissance garden as an emblem of italianità provided the context for both the re-creation of the villa’s gardens and the design of Mussolini’s forum—itself presented as an Italian garden, an unexplored instance of the mythologizing and manipulation of Renaissance heritage by Fascist ideologues establishing the Third Rome. The development of this zone constitutes a kaleidoscopic case study for the construction of political and cultural identity through urban design and landscape. Dismembered and partially neutralized post-war, the area currently represents a challenging entanglement of memory, heritage, politics, and aesthetics. And though the function and meaning of a city gateway have fundamentally changed over time, the long history of this topography—both real and metaphysical—is ingrained in the identity of modern Rome.
Ritual Form and Urban Space in Early Modern Rome
Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual Studies in Italian Urban Culture, 2013
This paper considers the role of ritual forms in presaging, even constructing, early modern Rome’s urban development. Its overarching argument is that processional routes, arches, floats, decorations, and performances often formed the living tissue from which new art, architecture, and urbanism drew in its reinvention of Rome. These evanescent and ephemeral forms, through the familiarity of a calendar repetition, forged an identity with the urban spaces in which they took place, in the eyes of their viewers. Inexorably, ritual marked the city’s material fabric with ‘memorative’ spaces, imbued with the collective memories of their iterative enactment. Much of the change in ritual activity in early modern Rome was driven by its popes, as was the city’s urban development. This intertwining of ritual and urban forms in the hands of the papacy worked to remake Rome’s civic fabric in the image of the popes. Spaces reclaimed by reinvented ritual forms became then permanently reconfigured by an attendant architecture, art, and urbanism. Key ritual spaces were widened, regularised, paved, in concert with their ceremonial roles; their surrounding buildings drawn into a choreographed urban scenography by means of new façades and fountains; while the memory of ritual decoration was latent within the forms of their sculptural ornament. Early modern Rome’s urban developments thus embodied in perpetuity the ritual histories out of which they grew. Finally, the paper argues for the potency of visual cultures, both ritual and artistic, in reinventing the identities of urban space.
Lexia, 2021
“Lexia”, the international, peer-reviewed journal of CIRCe, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication of the University of Turin, Italy, invites contributions to be published in the issue n. 39-40 of the new series. “Lexia”, la rivista internazionale peer-reviewed di CIRCe, il Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerche sulla Comunicazione dell’Università di Torino, sollecita contributi da pubblicare nel n. 39-40 della nuova serie. « Lexia », le journal international peer-reviewed de CIRCe, le Centre Interdépartemental de Recherche sur la Communication de l’Université de Turin, Italie, lance un appel à soumissions d’articles à publier dans le n. 39-40 de la nouvelle série. “Lexia”, la revista internacional peer-reviewed de CIRCe, el Centro Interdepartamental de Búsqueda sobre la Comunicación de la Universidad de Torino, Italia, invita artículos a publicar en el n. 39-40 de la nueva serie.
Fondare e ri-fondare. Parma, Reggio e Modena lungo la via Emilia romana. (Atti del simposio internazionale, Parma 12 e 13 dicembre 2017), ed. Alessia Morigi and Carlo Quintelli (Padova, Il Poligrafo casa editrice, 2018), 35-46, 2018
Contrasting conscious and unconscious modes by which cities preserve and display their past, this paper looks at the case studies of Thessaloniki, Zaragoza and Taragona to illustrate the different ways in which the traces of the past are deployed, displayed, and deleted.