Rome by fragments: A brief analysis of the invention and ‘restauration’ of Antiquity between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

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.