Piranesi’s “Pianta di Roma” is the official beginning and the conceptual center of the first volume of Le Antichità Romane. It is based on the early third-century CE Severan Marble Plan (or Forma Urbis Romae), an ancient map carved on stone tablets whose surviving fragments, the caption tells us, had recently been displayed in the Capitoline Museum. His printed map itself appears to be made of large marble slabs, like the pieces of the Severan Plan, but he breaks this illusionistic effect by extending fragments over the map’s border and into the caption. Similarly, the letters of “ROMA” resemble the bronze letters affixed to (rather than engraved in) building surfaces for ancient inscriptions. Their protrusions from the background of the page use ancient writing materials while echoing the trompe l’œil effect of the stone slab that is conveyed through print.
Heather Hyde Minor has illuminated this volume’s play with historical and contemporary writing media, its labyrinthine structure, and its persistent combinations of word and image (2015, 15-39). This map is indeed surrounded by texts: the caption below it, a lengthy typeset index for its central cartographic image, plus a shorter, engraved index to the fragments around its edges (below). The volume also includes a brief Preface addressed “agli studiosi delle Antichità Romane,” where Piranesi describes his approach to ancient ruins, saying he hoped to “conservarli col mezzo delle stampe.” This method of preservation is fundamentally bound to his medium of print, and this map uses features of printed books—the index, the cross-reference—to test, and to expand, print’s capacities for representing evidence and theories of Rome’s material past.
The numbers in the central part of this map within the city walls refer first to a typeset index found on this volume’s preceding pages. There, Piranesi points readers to his images in each of the four volumes of Le Antichità Romane by indicating the numbers of their plates and figures. These references to the index and then to his images are rendered here as hyperlinks; others, that refer only to text in the index, are not (yet). The numbers that correspond to the fragments surrounding the central part of the map—also rendered here as hyperlinks—refer to the separate two-page index of the marble fragments of the ancient map above. Finally, this map’s index contains references to the Map of the Roman Aqueducts that comes near the end of the volume, making a full comprehension of the Aqueduct map depend on a deep engagement with this map and its index. Navigating this map, and the four volumes it guides us through, presents many challenges.
Aside from these navigational tools, Piranesi himself suggests another method: the metaphor of a stroll around the city. Explaining the sequence of numbered items in the map, he says, in the preface to the Index, “Cominceremo intanto la spiegazione della topografia dal giro esterno intorno alle odierne mura di Roma, e precisamente dalla ripa del Tevere incontro il monte Testaccio, scorrendo dall’asterisco * secondo l’ordine de’ numeri consecutive.” Here, the “giro esterno intorno alle odierne mura di Roma” means the exterior borders around the contemporary city walls, which determines the initial sequence of the numbered items in the map as well as the vedute that follow. If, he notes at the end of the same paragraph, “nel nostro giro,” we stumble upon restorations to the wall made under Constantine, they should be recognized as being of the same construction as those by Aurelian (Index to the Map of Rome, Preface). It is as if Piranesi is offering this unwieldy volume as an oversized guidebook for a walking tour of the city.
The same term—“giro”—signifies a tour or stroll as well as the circumference of the city’s walls. At key points in the map, the metaphor returns to guide book-users through their imaginative stroll with Piranesi. First, in the reference to the Castel Saint Angelo, he states “Terminato il giro esterno delle mura, entreremo per la Porta del Popolo a ricercar gli antichi monumenti” (Index to the Map of Rome, no. 63). At The Bridge of the Quattro Capi, he redirects us, “Orchè, abbiamo terminato il giro fra l’odierno circuito delle mura urbane,” and asks us to move through the city and through the book: “proseguiremo le perquisizioni de’ Monumenti antichi entrando per la Porta Carmentale, colla consecutiva scorta de’ numeri” (Index to the Map of Rome, no. 162). In keeping with an increasing cultural interest in making the ancient past newly present, Piranesi’s “stroll” hints, however metaphorically, at being physically in the city instead of looking at a large, seemingly disorganized book. As an itinerary, the volume sets out a journey that would be, Jonathan Scott notes, especially grueling (Scott 118). This volume’s sequence of vedute, though, by moving from the water supply system to tourist attractions and various ruins, differs from that of the common guidebook and instead reveals Piranesi’s aim to present “a picture of the whole of ancient Rome as his aesthetic ideal” (Kantor-Kazovsky 99, 110).
John Wilton-Ely has emphasized the order that the map’s index establishes, observing that it allows this volume’s small vedute to be “readily placed within a larger context” while through the system of cross-references the maze-like “isolated fragments are explained in relation to one another” (1978, 51). For Minor, though, the complexity of Piranesi’s system of cross-references threatens to undermine the order that it seeks to establish and becomes “a wild course,” a journey that “all but the most intrepid and dogged lovers of antiquity would give up on” (2015, 35). In a digital format, that journey, or “our stroll” with Piranesi, becomes possible and challenging in new ways. The hyperlinked references shared here are intended to convey both the order and the chaos, the sense of presence and the reminders of absence, that this volume and its central map create through Piranesi’s ambitious use of the print medium. (JB)
N.B.: The numbering is off by one, starting at 256. The original edition skipped number 256, but the Didot edition’s addition of 256 throws off all following numbers by one. Digital annotations above have been corrected so that the proper spot on the map refers to the proper text in the index and the appropriate image in this and/or other volumes of the Roman Antiquities.
To see this image in the first volume of Antichità Romane, volume 1 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.
