Understanding damages. Digital reconstruction of the Amman Roman Theatre

Eleven Roman theatres, six ancient cities, a territory of the Near East composed initially of a league of ten cities located near the eastern boundary of the Roman Empire, between present-day Jordan, Syria, and Israel; their presence testifies to the wealth of the Jordanian nation, a land known by travellers for the ancient Petra but also for having been a natural stage with its desert landscapes and the Bedouin nomads to the sets of Indiana Jones, Aladdin, and The Martian. An international cooperation project coordinated by the author has scientifically documented, and for the first time, the Roman Theatre of Amman from the 2nd century AD, a monumental building inside the forum of ancient Philadelphia, part of the Greco-Roman Decapolis. Subsequently, the “Performing Theatre” exhibition is a multimedia experience to transform the visit into a journey to discover such an extraordinary and mysterious architecture that in the past was the theatre of actors and spectators, a mirror of the places of the Near East. The essay suggests a reflection on the role of tools for describing, narrating, and representing ancient monuments, underlining how travellers of the 18th and 19th centuries highlighted in their notebooks the charm of discovery as a psychological and cultural experience. The updating of scientific models, representative of the cultural heritage, and of the new technological paradigms, which increasingly allow us to “duplicate art,” makes this new adventure of rediscovery and knowledge of one of the most significant monuments in Jordan even more enjoyable. The architectural survey carried out with laser scanning tools, made it possible to transcribe the different parts of the theatre graphically, review, integrate, and complete the existing archaeological documentation, which was incomplete and with metric and graphic errors, and to resolve the ambiguities found in the various publications finally.