Figure 1 Plan of the Area of the Forum Romanum and the Imperial Fora in Antiquity. the Five Imperial Fora Are to the North; To
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Figure 1 Plan of the area of the Forum Romanum and the Imperial Fora in antiquity. The five Imperial Fora are to the north; to the south, the irregular piazza of the Forum Romanum lies between the Basilica Julia and the Basilica Aemilia (drawing by Joseph Skinner, adapted). Memory and Movement in the Roman Fora from Antiquity to Metro C amy russell Durham University Introduction: Movement and Memory movement can illuminate the enduring influence of ancient street networks on the modern cityscape. The Forum he built landscape of the city of Rome is a powerful Romanum and the neighboring Imperial Fora shared in engine of cultural memory.1 The visitor can pick antiquity and still share today a similar role as places of out elements of buildings two thousand years old T memory, but they have had different relationships to urban woven into the fabric of the modern city at every street corner movement networks (Figure 1). The Forum Romanum’s in the centro storico.2 But there is more to Rome than picture- function as a node on several ancient, medieval, and Renais- postcard images of crumbling columns juxtaposed with mod- sance major routes was vital to its preservation as a place of ern development. In Rome, perhaps more than anywhere memory for centuries until it was isolated and enclosed in else, ancient architecture is experienced not only as isolated the twentieth century. The Imperial Fora, on the other hand, and picturesque ruins but also as an integral part of the living became isolated from movement networks, and their histori- city. Scholars and tourists can choose to stand and wonder cal associations were largely forgotten until Mussolini at these buildings, photograph, draw, or write monographs used movement on the great processional route of the Via about each of them individually, but Rome’s inhabitants and dell’Impero to revitalize the area as central to Roman cul- visitors also walk and drive between and around them as they tural memory and identity. Both areas had experienced con- go about their daily business. tinuity in movement patterns from antiquity to the twentieth In this article, I investigate the relationship between century, when sweeping changes essentially reversed their movement and memory, and in particular how the integration relationship to the city. Mussolini’s road replaced the path of a space or building into the city’s wider movement patterns through the Forum Romanum as the major artery between affects its role as a place of memory. By considering two the Capitoline and the Colosseum. The pattern of long-term neighboring districts with very different ancient layouts continuity and the recent change in each area’s relationship and subsequent histories, I demonstrate how awareness of to the wider city are direct consequences of the way cultural the creation and reproduction of cultural memory through heritage has been consumed and cultural memory constructed Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73, no. 4 (December 2014), 478–506. through movement. ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2014 by the Society of Architectural Histo rians. In recent years, the relationship between these areas and All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions web- the city has come under greater scrutiny than ever before. An site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2014.73.4.479. entry fee for visitors to the Forum Romanum was introduced in 2008, and the practicalities surrounding payment and memory.”4 Very often these places of memory are literal enforcement meant that only a few points of entry and egress places. Buildings and landscapes endure temporally and could be used. The Via dell’Impero, renamed the Via dei are loaded with emotional significance and meaning for Fori Imperiali, has long been threatened by calls for demoli- the community. They play a role in the construction and tion, or at least pedestrianization. In 2013, Ignazio Marino reproduction of both communicative and cultural memory. made a proposal to close the road as part of his successful Individual events may be remembered in the place where campaign for mayor, although a year later the section of the they happened or deliberately memorialized by plaques, road that actually runs through the Imperial Fora remains statues, or monuments elsewhere. Anything from an archi- open to vehicular traffic. Through these tensions between tectural style to a toponym may call to mind some element cultural heritage and traffic circulation, the competing of the past. As a result, memories can be arranged spatially as demands of memory and movement continue to play a role well as chronologically, mapped onto the landscape in a way in Rome’s development. that disassociates each moment from its temporal context The ancient urban landscape was not just a series of and produces new juxtapositions.5 In Rome, history lives as individual monuments but a cityscape that organized space much in space as it does in time. Thinkers from Virgil to and controlled movement. In Rome, this aspect of the past Petrarch to Freud have used the sites of Rome to call up still impinges on modern movement patterns and behavior. memories of the past.6 But we need not stop there. If the past Romans and tourists alike walk their dogs in the Circus is neither ordered nor understood in terms of the chrono- Maximus, swerve their cars to navigate the piers of aqueducts logical progression of time, other methods of organizing and and walls at the Porta Maggiore, and have dinner in restau- structuring the past become important. In space, one of the rants built into the access corridors of the Theatre of Pompey, ways of joining individual memories into meaningful wholes perhaps commenting on the building’s history as they eat. is movement: both the movement of individuals as they go These activities form a vital part of how knowledge of the about the city and the shared knowledge and experience past is accessed, transmitted, and developed. In a few genera- of such routes as ritual processions.7 In a city, movement tions’ time, however, a restaurant may become an office or a becomes narrative. house, and the people who spend time there may tell differ- When we consider ancient architecture as monument, ent stories about it. our impulse is often to separate out the building from com- In Jan Assmann’s formulation, such stories exchanged municative memory and to move instead into the more over dinner would fall into the category of communicative permanent realm of cultural memory.8 This can involve dis- rather than cultural memory practices.3 Communicative missing the ephemeral patterns of behavior and movement memory consists of memories built by casual exchanges of that surround the edifice. Isolating an ancient building from information and spontaneous interactions and is of vital its place in urban life either now or in a previous period risks importance in the identity formation of individuals and missing those forms of behavior and movement that fit into groups, but the knowledge created and preserved through the more permanent category. Formalized or ritualized these practices dissipates within eighty or one hundred movement is a key component of long-term cultural memory years. Cultural memory represents more lasting forms of production and preservation. Each generation tells stories shared knowledge about the past (for Assmann, “Vergangen- about buildings in which and among which they live, but heitsbezug”) and includes the mechanisms by which they are those that are memorialized and formalized through cultural collectively concretized (“Erinnerungskultur”) through practices, including movement, have the greatest effect on objects, rituals, or texts designated by cultural practices as how the cityscape is known and understood. Such under- separate from the everyday and preserved over time. Cultural standing and knowledge affect decisions shaping the city’s memory offers fully realized ways of understanding the past cumulative architectural development over time. that can be transmitted between generations. Each genera- tion, in turn, uses cultural memory to construct its own collective identity. Although each individual or generation Static and Moving Modes of Experience relates to the resulting stories and knowledge differently, the The visual experience of ancient architecture has been a knowledge itself is relatively stable. prime method of accessing the city’s cultural heritage at least It is no accident that Pierre Nora referred to objects, since the Grand Tour flourished. The vedute of artists such symbols, events, and even people as crucial reference points as Étienne Dupérac and Giuseppe Vasi depict monuments in a group’s understanding of history using a spatial meta- as part of a living city; for the viewer, however, the element phor: “lieux de mémoire,” which I translate as “places of of movement in such depictions is missing (Figure 2; 480 JSAH / 73: 4 , DECEMBER 2014 Figure 2 Étienne Dupérac, Vestigi dell’Arco di Settimo Severo … 1607–20. View of the northern end of the Forum Romanum, showing the semiburied Arch of Septimius Severus on the left and the Church of Sant’Adriano (the ancient Curia) on the right (British School at Rome Archive, Ashby Collection, L611.D9.003). see Figure 14). The presence of figures in the foreground from the time of the republic and empire, made of nearly in contemporary dress, some going about their business indestructible Roman concrete, have served as foundations and others depicted as an audience of tourists, reminds the for later structures. Traces of ancient monuments are pre- viewer that the monuments these images depict have a wider served in the city’s fabric and layout almost everywhere: not context both spatially and temporally.