5-23-06

I cannot wait for the ear pieces to come in so that I can hear Professor Martemucci’s lectures. Today as we went through the Jewish Ghetto, Professor Martemucci attempted to show us how patterning changes over time. We also looked at the uses of spolia in Roman architecture, the way that builders have taken pieces and fragments of older structures and incorporated them into new buildings. He pointed one porch where columns had been taken from an ancient structure and “stuck” to the front of the building to create a porch. In another area, the lintel of a door was part of an old monument to someone’s mother, and because of its size and shape, it was reused in this new house.

In terms of patterns, we also looked at some structures from the Medieval period of Roman history and compared them to the more ancient structures we had explored on an earlier walk. We saw that the scope of the architecture had shifted, no longer did an architect sit down with paper and pencil and attempt to create a plan for a mammoth building which would show his transcendence of time. In the Medieval period the architect would build according to need, as reflected in some of the arches we looked at. The points of the arch corresponded to the reach of the builder, so that we didn’t have the massive arched domes of Adrianne’s Villa, but the simple arch of a stairway with a door beneath it. We saw how the Roman concept of organizing the world around one central city had perished with the demise of Rome. I began to wonder if there was some corollary between this shift of emphasis from permanent to transient architecture and the shift of emphasis from the city of man to the city of God. That is, if there is some connection between this shift in architecture and the writings of St. Augustine, so that instead of organizing the entire world around the idea of a permanent and physical Rome the world came to be organized around the idea of a transient and metaphorical Rome which only sheltered one temporarily until the next life (so barbarians could sack and destroy Rome without destroying the order of the world).

Next we went to the Teatro Machello which is half theatre/half building. The ancient theatre stands beneath a Medieval house. One can see where the ancient theatre has been eroded away, the exposed marble is in different states of decay and portions have been restored to keep the ancient building intact and suggest what the original structure looked like. The Medieval architects added buildings on top of the ancient structure, because they would be better fortified. The ancient building has been co-opted into houses and other buildings, sort of like spolia. I wonder how this changes the meaning of the original building, what does it mean to take an ancient monument and build something more modern into and on top of it?