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La Pianta marmorea di Roma antica : forma urbis Romae

Forma Urbis Romae : Map

The Forma Urbis Romae or Severan Marble Plan is a massive marble map of ancient Rome, created under the emperor Septimius Severus between 203 and 211. It originally measured 18 m (60 feet) wide by 13 m (45 feet) high and was carved into 150 marble slabs mounted on an interior wall of the Temple of Peace. Created at a scale of approximately 1 to 240, the map was detailed enough to show the floor plans of nearly every temple, bath, and insula in the central Roman city. The boundaries of the plan were decided based on the available space on the marble, instead of by geographical or political borders as modern maps usually are. The map was oriented with south at the top. On the map are names and plans of public buildings, streets, and private homes. The creators used signs and details like columns and staircases. The Plan was gradually destroyed during the Middle Ages, with the marble stones being used as building materials or for making lime. In 1562, the young antiquarian sculptor Giovanni Antonio Dosio excavated fragments of the Forma Urbis from a site near the Church of SS. Cosma e Damiano, under the direction of the humanist condottiere Torquato Conti, who had purchased excavation rights from the canons of the church. Conti made a gift of the recovered fragments to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who entrusted them to his librarian Onofrio Panvinio and his antiquarian Fulvio Orsini In all about 10% of the original surface area of the plan has since been recovered, in the form of over one thousand marble fragments, which are kept in the Palazzo dei Conservatori of the Capitoline Museums.

La Pianta marmorea di Roma antica : forma urbis Romae

Since 1960, this has been the fundamental reference work on the Severan Marble Plan of Rome. It marked the first photographic presentation of all the known fragments and offered the most comprehensive and scientific review to date of the fragments and the Plan itself. Only 400 copies were printed, however, so this work is difficult to find outside specialized research libraries. Volume one includes a bibliography (Carettoni), a history of the fragments (Colini), a list of fragments reproduced in Renaissance drawings (Carettoni), detailed study and decriptions of identified, non-identified, and lost fragments, a list of inscriptions (Colini), a thorough study of the aula, the wall, and the marble slabs (Cozza), a technical analysis of the Plan (Gatti), a discussion of its date, scope, and precedents (Gatti), and a reconstruction (Gatti). The first volume also includes helpful concordances that relate the fragments to the numbering systems of earlier publications, as well as indices that organize the fragments by number, thickness, epigraphy, building typology, and topography. Volume two reproduces the Renaissance drawings (pls. 1-14) but is mostly taken up by black and white photographs of the 712 incised fragments known to the authors, in three groups: complexes and monuments with known locations (pls. 15-32), complexes and monuments with unknown locations (pls. 33-34), and fragments with non-identified topography (pls. 35-60). Plate 61 (a-b) is Cozza's detailed drawing of the wall of the aula on which the Plan hung. Finally, plate 62 (a-b) is Gatti's schematic reconstruction of the marble slabs in situ with drawings of the identified fragments (both existing and known only from Renaissance drawings) superimposed onto the wall.