6/6 Train Thoughts

Leaving Rome, I find it appropriate that I’m facing away from the direction the train is moving, looking back on the city that I’ve just spent two of the most interesting, informational, and revelatory weeks of my life in. it’s hard to explain the scope of what I’ve just seen, and to put it into words within a matter of pages won’t do it justice. Yet, as I stare at the beautiful countryside of Italy, I’ve been given some time to think and space for my mind to find the words.

I think that my final impression of Rome is that I appreciate it as a concept, but in its current state of disrepair, construction, and rubble I can’t help but say that what the proceeding generations have done to it is nothing short of a tragedy. A few initial questions come to mind:

1. What would have happened to Rome had the practice of historic preservation been around in the first centuries after the birth of Christ?

2. Is the memory of the thing more important / less important than the thing itself?

3. What is easier to preserve, knowledge or buildings? (This really should be a part of 2)

4. Do I feel more or less of a sense of place than preceding generations considering what has been unearthed and what is still yet to be unearthed?

5. What is the morality of restoring ancient monuments around Rome?

One

Spolio is a term that generally means to take pieces of one building and apply them to new construction. In some of the various churches we visited, this practice was clearly noticeable. The nave of a church would be lined with two rows of columns, each of them having different bases, entasis, capitals, and overall heights. It has come to my attention that the reason for this practice was that after the fall of the Roman Empire and during the Middle Ages, the craft and skill that had been part of the collective consciousness of the Roman people to be able to construct these amazing churches had been lost. Both skilled labor and capital decreased, as did the population of Rome. As such, there was no one around to monitor these existing structures, and no one available to create new ones. Thus a practice was undertaken whereby columns (and other parts of buildings) were stripped from their original location and placed in the nave of some new church. The sight of these colonnades, while quite jarring, is understandable. Other examples include the stripping of the bronze from the Pantheon being used to create the Baldacchino, which sits now under the dome of St. Peter’s cathedral.

The question persists: if the early inhabitants of the freshly fallen Rome had placed as much importance on preserving existing structures for future generations as we do today, would we see the same Rome we see today? Or were the new conquerors of this ancient land so desperate to stamp out this once dominant civilization and was their disdain so great that if they had their way nothing at all would remain? Had there been a sense of conservation would I still be writing about the same feeling of melancholy that I possess now? It’s all a matter of perspective and the subjective experience we each have of the world. My sense is that there were just too few people to keep a city functioning in the years after the fall that had they all wanted to preserve the coliseum, there were not enough resources to do so.

Two/Three

What we have in Rome is a strong dichotomy between those structures that remain and those that remain simply in memory/writing/drawing. The Pantheon is clearly the most well preserved object we have from ancient Rome. But would its memory have survived until today had it been destroyed in, say the 7^th century by invading Barbarians? My guess is yes, although it would have been somewhat muted since all we would have of it in our consciousness is people writing about it and those that drew it when it stood. On the other hand, there are parts of the Forum which are completely destroyed and nothing remains but a few column bases. Yet the memory of these structures still remains because the Italian government has placed special emphasis on this area by charging an entrance fee in order to see them. My point here is that which would you rather have survived to this day: the building, or the legend? As an architect, the answer is easy: I would much rather have the building to look at, stand in, walk around, etc. But for those who are not architects or do not have an appreciation for these structures (which is the majority of people) would it matter to them either way?

If they could simply read about it without coming to Rome, would that satisfy those people?

If they didn’t even have the means to come to Rome, would it matter if the Pantheon existed or not, because they could just read about it and look at pictures of it?

If somehow all of the collective writings and drawings of the Pantheon were lost, but the building still stood, would these same people feel an urge to travel to Rome to experience the thing, since they could no longer simply passively experience it?

This brings me to my second point: is knowledge or the built environment easier to preserve? I look at knowledge from three different sources: oral traditions, writings in books, and electronic. Are any of these methods easier to maintain than the building itself? Over the years since the fall of Rome we have lost an inordinate amount from both categories. On the one hand, you could say that buildings are easier to preserve than knowledge: in cases where the Christians took over a pagan structure, such as the Pantheon, they were able to maintain it because that religion had the backing of the state, so it was protected in this way. On the other hand, buildings can be extremely difficult to preserve; any number of causes could destroy a building: fire, earthquake, war, material deterioration, etc. And there are certainly more buildings from ancient times which are NOT here than those that ARE here. In terms of the three forms of knowledge that were discussed, I would have to say that oral traditions might be the easiest of the three to preserve. This practice has been around for millennia, passed from generation to generation. There are countless unbroken chains of ancient stories which survive to the present day. Writing seems to be harder to preserve than oral traditions. For the same reasons that buildings could be destroyed, one could say the same for writing. In addition, if one society decides to conquer another and abhors everything they stand for, there is little hope that the writing will survive. We are the ones who cause the destruction of our own culture. I do not believe that enough time has passed for us to accurately gauge whether the electronic media is easy to preserve. Clearly, the infrastructure we have put in place for the internet is of our own creation, and could just as well be destroyed by the same people who created it. It is also easier to make digital copies of books, poems, treatises, etc. and by the time one source has been destroyed/deleted, 10 more have been created to take its place somewhere else in the world.

I guess what I’m trying to get at with this discussion is that civilization is fragile. After the fall of Rome, I do not believe the people who conquered the Italian peninsula knew exactly just what they had “inherited” from previous generations. They did not have the right amount of appreciation for the world that had been in existence for thousands of years. Today, however, we have both the mindset and the technology to be able to preserve these artifacts from the past. There is a rather fine line between survival and ruin. We should do everything we can today to take care of what we have left from the past; it’s not much.

Four

I came to Rome at a specific point in its history. There have been many travelers before me and there will be many more. So what exactly did I experience when I was in Rome? What is Rome? Is it a collection of ancient artifacts? Is it a collection of Classical buildings arranged like in those posters I saw of its recreation? Or is it a modern city that is struggling with its identity? I feel like the answer lies somewhere in the last question. In an effort to both preserve the past and move forward into the 21^st century, Rome is stuck somewhere in between. I do not have the same sense of place looking at ruined columns that were once the Forum of Julius Caesar. I need to be in that completed building in order to fully appreciate it: I think any architect would tell you that. I also do not feel the awe the Romans must have felt during the time that the Basilica of Maxentius was in working order. These buildings are gone now, so should I stand there and simply appreciate their ruins and say, “that would’ve been cool to see completed?” I definitely feel less of a sense of place in Rome around the ancient ruins than the Romans must have felt at the height of their empire. The excavations at the Imperial Forum, Republican Forum, and Palatine Hill just feel like an open air museum, not a cohesive urban design fabric. Therefore, should we restore some of these relics of the past? This brings me to my final point.

Five

What is the morality of restoring the ancient monuments around Rome? There is a debate over the modern street that runs over some of the ancient Imperial Forums. There are more excavations that could be done by removing this street (and possibly finding more evidence to add to the story of Rome), but should this be undertaken at the cost of removing one of the more highly trafficked roads in Rome? Obviously a modern city needs roads to function. They keep the city moving with ideas, people, goods, services, etc. Yet should this service be interrupted in order to potentially dig up a few more ancient column bases? Doesn’t Rome have enough of those already? Morality is a tricky concept, especially in a world today that sees large issues like this as gray rather than black and white. There can be arguments made for both sides that would probably sound equally convincing. Would a potential solution be to augment the city’s streets, close down the Via dei Fori Imperali, and excavate down to see what’s there, restoring the street after a period of years where enough evidence has been gathered that it could be placed back into working order? Could the road remain with it being supported by open-air scaffolding while excavations take place around it? There’s no easy solution. Someone is going to end up unhappy about the results: those archaeologists who want to excavate, or those who want to keep the modern city up and running to its full capacity.

And what about those monuments which do not interfere with today’s modern city. The Forum, for instance, is replete with these types of structures. Should they be restored to what they previously looked like in ancient Rome? Should these buildings remain purposely functionless for an indefinite amount of time? If Rome attempted to restore them, would there be a political outcry from those who would deem restoration unnecessary, as the city and country have bigger problems to worry about? I ask these questions not necessarily seeking answers, but posing them to get myself thinking about these issues in terms of not only Rome, but other cities around the world that have ruins. I’m sure that when I get to places like Greece and Turkey, I will be debating these same issues.