Archaeology in the city of Rome, although complicated by the continuous occupation of the site, is blessed with a multiplicity of source material. Numerous buildings have remained above ground since antiquity, such as the Pantheon, Trajan’s Column, temples and honorific arches, while extensive remains below street level have been excavated and left on display. Nearly 13 miles (19 kilometers) of city wall dating to the third century CE, and the arcades of several aqueducts are also still standing. The city appears in ancient texts, in thousands of references to streets, alleys, squares, fountains, groves, temples, shrines, gates, arches, public and private monuments and buildings, and other toponyms. Visual records of the city and its archaeology can be found in fragmentary ancient, medieval, and early modern paintings, in the maps, plans, drawings, and sketches made by architects and artists from the fourteenth century onwards, and in images captured by the early photographers of Rome.
Textual references to the city are collected together and commented upon in topographical dictionaries, from Henri Jordan’s Topographie der Stadt Rom in Alterthum (1871–1907) and Samuel Ball Platner and Thomas Ashby’s Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929), to Roberto Valentini and Giuseppe Zucchetti’s Codice Topografico della Città di Roma (1940–53), the new topographical dictionary published in 1992 by Lawrence Richardson Jnr and the larger, more comprehensive Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae (LTUR) (1993–2000), edited by Margareta Steinby (see also LTURS). Key topographical texts include the fourth‐century CE Regionary Catalogues (the Notitia Dignitatum and Curiosum – see Flower, Chapter 1ii in this volume), the inscription on the Capitoline Base (CIL 6.975; ILS 6073), a dedication by the vicomagistri to Hadrian in 136 CE listing each vicus and its magistrates in five regions (I, X, XII, XIII, XIIII), and the numerous labels on the Severan Marble Plan (see Tucci, Chapter 1iii in this volume, and the list in Valentini and Zucchetti, vol. 1, 56–62).
Antiquarian maps, drawings, prints, engravings and vedute (views) of Rome survive from the early fifteenth century onwards, providing valuable information about the way the city looked in the early modern period, and in particular, unique records of ancient buildings or monuments that are no longer visible in Rome as the result of deliberate destruction or deterioration. Outstanding are those produced in the early sixteenth century by Antonio da Sangallo “the Younger” and Baldassare Peruzzi which document, for example, the lost roof and spolia colonnades of Old St Peter’s basilica, originally built by the emperor Constantine in the fourth century CE and rebuilt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Krautheimer 1977, 234). Similarly, Andrea Palladio’s work remains our foremost evidence for the ground plans of the Baths of Agrippa, Titus, and Trajan (Claridge 2010, 33). Giovanni da Sangallo’s drawings (1496–1548), those of Pirro Ligorio (c.1513–1583), Etienne Du Pérac’s Vestigi dell’Antichità di Roma (1571), Giuseppe Vasi’s Delle Magnificenze de’Romani (1747–1761), and Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma (1747–1778) variously document the monuments, buildings, and archaeological discoveries of Rome from the Renaissance to the Settecento (eighteenth century).
Historical maps of modern Rome are also primary topographical tools, providing an additional glimpse of an almost unrecognizable city, before much of the archaeological and construction work of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took place. The earliest is Leonardo Bufalini’s, an orthogonal woodcut print of 1551 at a scale of roughly 1:2800 and in 24 joined sheets, which was used by generations of later cartographers as the basis for their own plans, notably Antonio Tempesta’s etched plan of 1593 (in 12 sheets), Giovanni Maggi’s in 1625 (in 48 sheets), and Giovanni Battista Falda’s in 1676 (12 sheets). Giambattista Nolli’s impressively accurate survey, La Pianta Grande di Roma, was published in 1748 and often includes indications (in black) of ancient walling within the fabric of the modern city (see Borsi 1986; 1990; 1993; Leuschner 2012). Rodolfo Lanciani’s detailed reconstruction of the ancient city, the Forma Urbis Romae (1893–1901), is an essential resource which maps ancient and medieval buildings overlaid on the modern city. The accompanying publication Storia degli scavi di Roma provides a chronological record of finds and excavations (scavi) in the city. Lanciani’s maps were reprinted in 1990, while the Storia degli scavi was updated and completed in seven volumes in 2002, taking the story from the Middle Ages to 1870. New digital, GIS‐based maps of ancient Rome have been developed by Roma Tre University for the local, municipal archaeological service (Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali), and in Germany by the AIS project based at Munich (LMU: Häuber and Schütz, 2004). Images of the fragments of the Severan Marble Plan are being made available with commentary online via the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project.
The first photograph...
