The Substrate and Urban Transformation.Rome: The Formative Process of the Pompeo Theater Area

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A B S T R A C T The city is an organism that has been transformed through continuous modifications of its form. In these transformations, we can find traces that remain and organize the successive urban aggregates over time. The case that will be proposed is the one of the urban fabric formed in the area of Pompeo’s theater, in the Renaissance district of Rome. Through Saverio Muratori’s studies on the urban history of Rome and the new archaeological discoveries, the formation of residential building on the remains of the ancient building until its specialization was analyzed. The role of the substratum, evident in this case,the study shows how spontaneous architecture attests to the great forms of the past, and reuses them in every era, transforming and reinterpreting them. In this way the city is so eternal reuse of its forms, its paths and its materials.

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The Substrate and Urban Transformation. Rome: The Formative Process of the Pompeo Theater Area *Ph.D. CandidateCRISTIAN SAMMARCO1 1Architecture and Project Department, Faculty of Architecture, La Sapienza University, Italy E mail: cristian_sammarco@virgilio.it 1. Introduction A B S T R A C T The city is an organism that has been transformed through continuous modifications of its form. In these transformations, we can find traces that remain and organize the successive urban aggregates over time. The case that will be proposed is the one of the urban fabric formed in the area of Pompeo’s theater, in the Renaissance district of Rome. Through Saverio Muratori’s studies on the urban history of Rome and the new archaeological discoveries, the formation of residential building on the remains of the ancient building until its specialization was analyzed. The role of the substratum, evident in this case,the study shows how spontaneous architecture attests to the great forms of the past, and reuses them in every era, transforming and reinterpreting them. In this way the city is so eternal reuse of its forms, its paths and its materials. CONTEMPORARY URBAN AFFAIRS (2019), 3(2), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.25034/ijcua.2018.4695 www.ijcua.com Copyright © 2018 Contemporary Urban Affairs. All rights reserved. The research focuses on the study of the historical city and its evolutionary and formative processes through the act of transformation of the existing. Starting from the assumption that "the single work has meaning only if generated and read in the great flow of the cities’s transformations and territory, as an ongoing energy that modifies the pre-existing" shows how the formal and constructive characteristics of an ancient organism remain in organization of the city and help in the hierarchization of the elements. According to Saverio Muratori it’s possible to find, through the reading of historical textiles, two large organic categories of shapes: the elementary forms, modular and rhythmic, and the accentuating and cohesive forms. The first are characterized by residential construction that specializes in the base cell through a work of addition, recast and synthesis, transforming itself into a supportive organism and transmitting this process cyclically to the subsequent building organisms. The latter, object of the study, are represented by the ancient public monumental buildings such as theaters and amphitheatres. These in urban history appear as catalysing elements of paths and building fabrics; they present themselves as the pivot of urban transformation from the late ancient age to the medieval, arriving to our days more or less explicit and legible in urban plots depending on their political-economic role and their characteristics cohesive with the context. Here we don’t want to propose a philological reconstruction of the original ancient building but through an analysis of the sources and reliefs available to us in the archaeological field we want to show the concrete persistence of their shape and the permanence of the physical elements of the structure. We want to show how the ancient substratum is a guiding element that can perimeter our choices within the urban organism so as not to get lost in the sea of possibilism. Figure 1. From the plan of Nolli of 1748 it is evident the permanence of the shape of the ancient buildings in the modern city and their relationship with the paths 2. The role of the Substrate and the Renaissance district in Rome To understand the "formative" character of the sub-stratum in the events of the urban organism it’s possible to start from a statement by Luigi Pareyson: "Art could never arise if the whole spiritual life didn’t already prepare it with its common format. This is why art has to be sought in a sphere in which that format is able to acquire a determined and distinct character, with its own specific and irrepressible autonomy (Estetica, 2002). "The Roman Southern “Campo Marzio”, now called as the Renaissance district , is a virtuous example, in many cases an unicum, of a special antique fabric that hasn’t lost its organic character overtime, and of the Roman building events, thanks to the presence of monumental buildings that have maintained "an irrepressible autonomy" through their circular shapes. The area was urbanized in late Republican age under Pompeo Magno, after a long reclamation work due to the continuous flooding of the Tiber that had transformed the site into a marshland, Palus Caprae. The Roman general began the monumentalization of the area in 55 BC, probably driven by the desire to exploit and monetize his possessions in the area, with the construction of the theater which then took its name. Numerous monumental complexes followed throughout the imperial age, giving rise to a special building district for play and religious purposes. Among these complexes are important for this study, in addition to the theater of Pompeo, the stadium of Domitiano and his Odeon, the theater of Balbo, that of Marcello and the quadriportici present in the area. These were connected, through a tangible relationship to a series of paths that are still partly recognizable in the current topography. The transition between late ancient and middle ages, very often obscure and neglected in urban morphology studies due to the difficulty of the information available, is instead fundamental to understand how this fabric of special buildings has continued to live through the conservation of its plant. Marcello Marocco and Luigia Zoli, in a critical paper on the morphology of the Renaissance district, show the factors that have contributed to the formation and modification of this urban sector. They articulate the study in five essential points: 1) reconfirms the elements such as walls, bridges, streets and monuments that characterized the ancient structure; 2) presence of catalyst elements of successive building transformations such as basilicas, villas, hortus and domus cultae; 3) creation of a system of tensions capable of guiding the reconstitution of urban morphology according to certain directions; 4) the great polarities (centers of life): Campidoglio, Mausoleum of Hadrian (later Castel Sant'Angelo) and the Vatican; 5) the type of land use that in the Middle Ages gravitates around the residential nuclei that are both secular and religious;

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