#Ancient cities maps archive
#Ancient cities maps series

In the design that eventually won out, Valadier kept this oval shape and reworked the ramps to make them more graceful and easier to navigate.

#Ancient cities maps series

A later plan drawn, by another architect depicts an oval piazza with a series of symmetrical ramps on the left side leading up a hill that borders the square (see below). One of ValadierвЂ™s early designs would have created a polygonal piazza. One series of drawings, for example, shows the evolving plans for the Piazza del Popolo, a large public square that was redesigned in the early 1800s by the architect Giuseppe Valadier.

#Ancient cities maps archive

The archive reveals how designers throughout history cleverly navigated RomeвЂ™s topography and existing architecture. Much of this material is now accessible in the online archive. Much had changed in Rome since NolliвЂ™s day, of course, and Lanciani turned to tax maps, architectural plans, sketches, drawings, paintings, and photographs to fill in details about the cityвЂ™s development. The detail is remarkable, and remarkably accurate-centuries later, modern satellite maps line up well with NolliвЂ™s map. Buildings are completely flat, with their outlines and basic floor plans visible. NolliвЂ™s map, in contrast, shows the city from a vantage point that looks directly down on it. Nolli was an architect and surveyor, and his map of Rome bucked the cartographic tradition of the time, which favored a slightly elevated birdвЂ™s eye perspective. Only fragments of the marble map have survived (1,186 are currently known and accounted for), and Lanciani referred to these in creating his map.ДЄnother major source he used was the beautiful 1748 map created by Giambattista Nolli (see below). At a remarkable scale of 1:240, even the floor plans of buildings were visible in considerable detail. This ancient map would have made even LancianiвЂ™s enormous map look puny-it was roughly 43 by 60 feet. Lanciani named his map Forma Urbis Romae, after an early third century map of the same name that was carved in marble. (The same team previously put most of LancianiвЂ™s map online as part of MappingRome). universities, in collaboration with the Italian government, has digitized about 4,000 of these documents and made them freely available online for anyone to view. But now a team of scholars from three U.S. Since his death in 1929, his archive has been held at ItalyвЂ™s Istituto Nazionale di Archeologia e Storia dellвЂ™Arte (National Institute of Archaeology and Art History) in Rome, where even researchers have had limited access to it. To make his map, Lanciani collected thousands of photographs, sketches, and other documents, which until now have been largely inaccessible. вЂњItвЂ™s one of the first attempts to show the different periods of historic Rome on a map,вЂќ says Allan Ceen, an urban historian and collaborator on the MappingRome project, which seeks to draw on and digitize a variety of historical sources to map centuries of changes to Rome. LancianiвЂ™s map is color coded, so that the ancient and medieval parts of the city are depicted in black, early modern parts are red, and modern parts are blue (from LancianiвЂ™s perspective, modern meant anything after about 1871, when Rome became the capital of a newly unified Italy). Lanciani published it as 46 separate sheets over the course of eight years. Fully assembled, itвЂ™s roughly 17 feet by 24 feet. The map, created by archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani, documents the city in meticulous detail from its ancient past through the end of the 19th century. A 1901 map of Rome is arguably the best map ever made of the most mapped city in human history.