Ebook: The Atlas of Ancient Rome: Biography and Portraits of the City

Revised edition. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017. — 1280 p.

The Atlas of Ancient Rome is the result of about twenty years of research, conducted by a team of specialists dedicated to the reconstruction of Rome’s urban landscapes from halfway through the ninth century BC to the sixth century AD. This research was framed by the ongoing, large-scale scientific project promoted by the Sapienza University of Rome, in collaboration with the Special Oversight Commission for the Archeological Assets of Rome, under the protection of the Ministry of Cultural Assets and Activities.
The starting point for this work, as seen in the well-developed index of the volume and its methodological introduction, was the rigorous archiving of both the published data (bibliographical and cartographical), and unpublished works on discoveries within the Aurelian Walls. Thanks to the most advanced technology, this “Archeological Information System” has produced a series of rich images (mapping phase, reconstruction, and style) that document the development of the city over the course of time.
Andrea Carandini’s emblematic title essay, “Rome in Flight and Rome in Freefall,” establishes an intellectual position inspired by communication and an appreciation for cultural assets, along with the knowledge (stemming from scientific research and archeological excavation) that nourishes our guardianship of those assets.
In the first section, the Atlas examines the city as a whole—the natural and historical landscape, with its sacred boundaries and political-administrative subdivisions. It investigates the economic life of the city through the sites of production and commerce. Finally, the city’s social landscape (residential quarters and private property), infrastructure (walls, streets, aqueducts, sewers), and green areas (the horti) all inform an analysis of Rome’s transition into the medieval age.
In the second section, the discreet sectors of the Urbs are accurately described, using the conventionally identified fourteen Augustan Regiones.
The text of each chapter traces the history of a single Regio and marks the phases of that Regio’s history with the decisive points in its evolution, namely the moments of significant transformation in overall urban structure.
Iconography plays a decisive role in this publication. The numerous reliefs, graphics, and historical photographs of excavations, monuments, and artistic masterpieces are both innovative and scientifically significant inclusions. Beyond those innovations, the maps allow the scholar to view the architectural emergence of specific urban areas as a whole, while the insets clearly and effectively reconstruct those areas’ most important building complexes, based on both that which has been preserved and that which has been lost but documented.
The printed contents have been distilled from an extremely rich computerized database that includes the following: orographic and hydrographic maps; historical cartography (from the most ancient plans of Rome to the city planning maps); photographic planimetries; the marble Forma Urbis from the Severan age; an updated, interactive, georeferenced, topographic archeological map; collected literary and epigraphic sources; registries of buildings; and a series of film and virtual-reality multimedia.
Within the vast scientific project outlined above, Andrea Carandini has succeeded in the difficult task of exhaustively illustrating the thousand faces Rome wore from its origins until the end of antiquity.