« Radio silence | Main | The best analysis of Italian politics I've read all week »
January 24, 2008
Fascist city planning is - um - big
It was a LONG walk from the Metro Station to the museum. It didn't help that I missed the turn - but the main problem is that E.U.R. was designed for cars instead of people - and that's an incredible contrast to the city center. I think everyone got that point!
The Museo della Civiltà Romana is south and east of the city - towards the airport - in EUR, Esposizione Universale Roma, a region of development planned to host a world's fair in 1942 in conjunction with the 1942 Olympics Mussolini didn't get to host because of that World War! I believe he opened EUR anyway to celebrate year XX of the Fascist regime.
The whole zone is a monument to Rationalist City Planning, though the museum itself is in a stripped classical style, and there's no better way to feel the difference in planning scale for people who've been walking around Rome for two weeks than to walk from the Metro station to the museum.
So, the museum is a triumph of oddity - it has almost nothing 'real.' The collection is made up of high quality plaster casts (surely some of the little pottery things are authentic, but I've never slowed down to look) of some of the most important Roman statues and reliefs. They were assembled for two purposes - a 1911 exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the unification of Italy* and a big 1930s exhibition about Augustus. Given that you could see almost all the real things in Rome, about the only reason to go see the casts is that they have the complete Column of Marcus Aurelius frieze arranged at eye-level, which is handy. In general, though, the collection is a fine example of creating national identity with the art of the past, certainly a topic of our BiDisciplinary course this semester. I wonder if that 1911 show travelled around the country?
But then there's the model of Rome! If you took Latin in high school you've seen photos or posters of it - it's omnipresent: Rome c. 300 CE. Click on the picture, go to my Flickr page, and look at the students admiring the model! Whereas their experience of EUR was a piece of embodied analysis, feeling the scale, here they get a bird's eye view of the City they've been trying to piece together for 2 weeks. I think it's the perfect conclusion to the Armature Project, and I heard enough of the right kind of reactions to think it worked again this time, things like "Ohhhh! That's where that is! Ah! There's the Servian Wall!"
*The defeat of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies by the Garibaldini and its absorption by the Savoys, at least - they didn't get Rome until 1870.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at January 24, 2008 7:51 PM
Comments
I'm still bitter that I never got a chance to go down and see this museum. Gismondi's model is another thing which is currently being digitized - with amazing detail i might add - by Bernard Frischer at UVA. Their digital reconstruction of the entire city ca 310 is really something to see.
http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/
also, hate to be "that guy", but it's the column of Trajan, not MA.
.....Argh! Hard to tell up close - all those Barbarians look alike to me! I shoulda known when I couldn't find the miracle of the rain... Oh, I knew that link, but I was thinking of it as being at UCLA for some reason. --MCT
Posted by: Tyler Franconi at January 24, 2008 9:40 PM