Forma Urbis Romae

Since I'm currently afflicted with train delays, this seems like a good time to write a first actual post for this blog. Here goes:

Around 205 AD, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus ordered the construction of a monumental map of the city of Rome, to be placed in the forum. Specifically, it was to cover sixty feet of wall in the Forum of Peace, built by the emperor Vespasian over a century earlier. This map was called the Forma Urbis Romae, and reproduced the city's landscape in minute detail, down to the number of columns supporting each roof. The public display of the Forma, carved into slabs of marble two inches thick, crowned Septimius Severus' restoration of the Templum Pacis within Vespasian's forum. This conjunction fixed the map not only in a practical, but also a symbolic location: while entrance to the temple was reserved to priests, the temple's exterior carried an image of the urban whole, a whole upheld by the edifice of peace.

Most of the Severan marble plan is now lost; the wall that supported it still stands, reclaimed as part of the Church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, but the map either fell off or was removed (most likely, a combination) in the early middle ages. About 10% of the original has been recovered as fragments; the remaining slabs either lie buried or else were turned over and used to pave the aisles of churches, or ground up into lime for new brickwork. Stanford University has recently undertaken the project of piecing together the fragments—a nearly impossible task (check it out here). But from what survives, the character of the map is clear: it depicts an undifferentiated, uniplanar space; there are no terrain markings to indicate Rome's seven hills, and, in the clear, dark lines of the map, every building seems to be in an identical, pristine condition (the aesthetic of Google Maps). Also, from the orientation of the writing, it is clear that—as was customary—the map was oriented not with the north, but with the southeast at the top.

Today, Rome is not the Rome of the Severan plan, neither in form or idea; Rome is not pristine (nor was it then); most of its buildings are in some need of repair, and those that remain from the time of the Forma are generally in ruins. And even more than it did in 205 AD, Rome's landscape extends in three dimensions: outward to its walls, upward to its hilltops, and downward several stories into the earth, the level of the city's submerged past. Even on the surface, Rome cannot be said to be uniplanar: the buildings on any city block span centuries, often millennia. In both space and time, then, Rome extends in all directions simultaneously and disparately. It is a city of fragments, held together by a single, sometimes incoherent urban network.

This brings us back to the Severan plan, not in its original form, but its current one: fragments of marble. The map, now, is more representative of Rome than it ever was in Severus' day. Rome has never had a smooth white surface, nor the well-ordered topography the Forma suggests; it was then, and is even more so now, a jumbled pile of moments, of clashing visions and decay and growth. Thus as difficult as Stanford's project is, theirs is the work that is demanded of anyone who walks through Rome; the city requires piecing together.

The image below, an engraving by Piranesi, uses the Forma to make this very point; like stones arranged to build a fireplace, excavated pieces of the map are here assembled as as Piranesi sees fit, without regard to their original meaning or orientation. In Piranesi's imagination is found both the danger and the opportunity of Rome: when the old structure is broken down, its pieces can be reassembled in any way you choose.