The Digital PiranesiMain MenuAboutThe Digital Piranesi is a developing digital humanities project that aims to provide an enhanced digital edition of the works of Italian illustrator Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778).Works and VolumesGenres, Subjects, and ThemesBibliographyGlossary
View of the remains of the ancient buildings on the slopes of the Aventine along the road called the Marmorata
12020-04-10T20:59:21-07:00Avery Freemanb9edcb567e2471c9ec37caa50383522b90999cba228491from Volume 01 of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Opereplain2020-04-10T20:59:21-07:00Internet Archivepiranesi-ia-vol1-037.jpgimageAvery Freemanb9edcb567e2471c9ec37caa50383522b90999cba
12021-03-30T11:16:11-07:00View of the Remains of the Ancient Buildings on the Slopes of the Aventine Along the Road Called the Marmorata10Veduta degli avanzi di antiche fabbriche alle falde dell'Aventino sulla strada detta di Marmorataplain2024-11-06T07:49:17-08:00Veduta degli avanzi di antiche fabbriche alle falde dell'Aventino sulla strada detta di Marmorata.; A. Avanzi delle saline antiche. B. Speco del condotto dell’Acqua Appia. C. Fontanella moderna provegnente dal detto speco. D. Salita moderna detta anticamente il Clivo di Publicio. E. Avanzi delle sostruzioni dell’Aventino.; Piranesi Architett(o) dis(egnò) e inc(ise).View of the remains of ancient buildings on the slopes of the Aventine Hill along the road called the Marmorata.; A. Remains of the ancient salt mines. B. Channel of the Aqueduct of the Acqua Appia. C. Modern small fountain that draws from the aforementioned channel. D. Modern hill, in ancient times called the Clivus Publicius. E. Remains of the foundations of the Aventine Hill.; Drawn and engraved by the Architect Piranesi.
This image is one of many in this volume that is both referenced in the index to the Map of Rome and connected to the Map of the Roman Aqueducts. Those ties, which span the full expanse of the volume, are as much a part of the image above as its visual details: the deep gouges of vegetation and weathered stone, the seated man on the left whose arm breaks the margin, and the large letters across its surface that signal identifying information in the key.
One of those letters (B) marks a dark rectangular opening in the Aventine Hill that Piranesi identifies as the outlet of the Acqua Appia. Scholars before and after Piranesi’s time have placed it elsewhere, at a point further along the Aventine. Centering on this image, Sarah Buck has unraveled the connections between Piranesi’s visual, textual, and cartographic evidence to conclude that the complexity of his web of references makes any disagreement with his claim virtually impossible: he overwhelms users of his book with scattered evidence in different media, all loosely interwoven through indexical references from one map to its index, and then to another map and other illustrations, all of which simply becomes too much to handle (Buck 2008).
In the Index to the Map of Rome, Piranesi refers to this image and its information. Number 184 on the map (below), he explains in the index, identifies the terminus of arches that carried water of the Acqua Claudia to the Aventine. He then points readers to footnote 21 of his Explanation of the Map of the Aqueducts (a translation of Frontinus rather than an actual explanation of the aqueduct map), and points to details in that map, where he indicates the Neronian Arches at numbers 33, 34, 35, 36, and 37 (in the circled area below). Finally, in the same index entry, he directs us to this image, whose annotations point out the ruins of the Neronian Arches and those of the castellum of the aqueduct (A, B, C). In his pursuit of the granular details and the totalizing systems of ancient Rome’s water management, Piranesi, through the excessiveness of his printed references, tests the limits of both printed and digital media. (JB)
