Rome was not built in a day

February 7, 2021 4:09 AM

In 1933 Benito Mussolini commissioned archaeologist Italo Gismondi to create a scale model of ancient Rome as a piece of propaganda.
It took him over 35 years to complete the Plastico di Roma Imperiale.
Here is a street view.
posted by adamvasco (17 comments total)

Neat post and project, but I can't be the only one who's disappointed that the Google Street View is just an overhead camera.

I was hoping they'd sent a miniature Google Maps truck through the streets. You know, so you could gawk at blurry-headed ancient Romans standing awkwardly in line at the thermopolium.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:26 AM on February 7, 2021 [25 favorites]

1) Thank you for this post.
2) Oh FFS I miss travel. Rome is awesome. I was meant to go there last year.
posted by pompomtom at 5:12 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

See also: Panorama of the City of New York, which is a modern version of this, and the Severan Marble Plan, which was an ancient version of this.
posted by phooky at 5:21 AM on February 7, 2021 [6 favorites]

This is my jam. Also, for a similar take, an epic recreation of ancient Rome in LEGO.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:08 AM on February 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

A quote from a (paywalled, available by the usual means) paper linked to, but then sort of dismissed, by the MyModernMet link:

The correspondence between the model and the intense rebuilding and expansion of the city under Mussolini is a significant and virtually ignored episode in existing literature on Fascist architecture. At a closer look it becomes obvious that the model reconstructs less ancient Rome than it creates a Fascist city all’antica. This essay argues that the model propagated and reinforced an official architecture by inventing its ancient pedigree. Antiquity itself, it seemed, sanctioned an architec- tural style and urban planning strategies that in reality were radically modern, even controversial.

I certainly don't have the expertise to evaluate this sort of thing, but this would hardly be the first fascist project attempting to revise history for its own benefit. While the model is certainly impressive, its ahistorical, ideological nature should be front-and-center instead of dismissed as it is by MyModernMet and largely ignored by AJA.

none of this aimed at adamvasco. just frustrated with the articles
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 6:20 AM on February 7, 2021 [6 favorites]

I can't imagine why Charlie Kaufman's film "Synecdoche, New York" came to mind just now.
posted by PhineasGage at 6:36 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Neat post and project, but I can't be the only one who's disappointed that the Google Street View is just an overhead camera.

I came here to say exactly that. Let me wander around some tiny, tiny streets! We have the technology!
posted by mhoye at 7:10 AM on February 7, 2021 [6 favorites]

Ave Roma! Hic sumus!
posted by homerica at 7:26 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

This model features prominently in the TV version of David Macaulay's City and thus I was tremendously excited when the Latin teacher in high school had a poster of it and I learned that it was in Rome. (I'm sure the poster was from the Museo della Civita Romana, but somehow didn't note this down.) And thus, when my family went to Rome when I was in high school, my brother and I were trying very hard to figure out where it was. I was sort of randomly flipping through the guidebook while we were eating lunch sitting on some steps at the Vatican and then boom! I found a reference. So we decided that going to EUR was more important than seeing the Sistine Chapel. The model is/was in the "other half" of the museum (which is across a courtyard and possibly a different beilding) and so I was terribly disappointed that we hadn't found it. But then, right as we were about to leave, my brother was looking at the map of the museum and deduced it had to be in this other part. And it was! This was more or less the high point of the trip.

Coincidentally, the Museo della Civita Romana closed "for renovations" a couple of years ago, so I'm not actually sure you can still see it.

I certainly don't have the expertise to evaluate this sort of thing, but this would hardly be the first fascist project attempting to revise history for its own benefit.

Our entire trip to Rome was basically a game of of "Ancient Rome or Mussolini trying to resurrect the Roman Empire".
posted by hoyland at 7:27 AM on February 7, 2021 [11 favorites]

See also: Panorama of the City of New York, which is a modern version of this...

Speaking of which, why are some of the buildings in that model red? The article doesn't seem to address this, unless I keep missing it.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:41 AM on February 7, 2021

...Severan Marble Plan...

DIGITAL MAP OF THE SLABS OF THE FORMA URBIS ROMAE

Alas- "...only 10-15% of the Plan survives--and in 1,186 pieces... Even after the Plan's rediscovery in the 16th c. CE, pieces of it were used as construction material and lost."

See also Lanciani's 1901 Forma Urbis Romae, from which Gismondi also drew.

this would hardly be the first....

All political types attempt to frame history for their own benefit. Hell, both sides of the US political divide are doing that right now. I disagree that politics need be front and center of any and all discussions of the forma or the scholars and artisans who built it.
posted by BWA at 7:45 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Out front of where I am living right now is a tiny waste reclamation facility, with tiny garbage trucks lined up to deliver their tiny loads. And I was coming in here, like others, ready to squee over the tiny street view... alas. So it was already in mind, but also apropos here: City Of Tiny Lites. Tiny is as tiny do!
posted by Meatbomb at 8:03 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

I wonder, obviously, just how accurate the model is.
posted by Beholder at 8:20 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

I hadn't read the comments first and in my excitement believed this was "tiny street view" instead of street view hovering above the model. The people I sent the link to were as disappointed as escape from the potato planet and I were.
posted by Nec_variat_lux_fracta_colorem at 8:37 AM on February 7, 2021

The museum in which the Plastico is housed is something else. Seeing it was one of the (many, to be fair) high points of a quarter I spent in Rome as a classics undergraduate. The life size recreations of war machines, standards, etc. was striking, all the more so for being surrounded by a neighborhood created at one go by the Fascists. The desire to manifest an imagined reality was palpable on many levels.
posted by cupcakeninja at 9:09 AM on February 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

Anyone who wants tiny street view should get the assassins creed game set in Rome. I learned most of the geography that way.
posted by rebent at 2:08 PM on February 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

I just want to have a legend as to what everything is. Not just the big set pieces (but don't exclude them), but every building, big and small. "Residence, prosperous", "hovel", "brothel", "restaurant", "bar" all of it.

I have no way of telling, but I'm guessing the model doesn't hold up to that level of scrutiny.
posted by maxwelton at 4:55 PM on February 7, 2021 [3 favorites]