[HN Gopher] The Shape of Rome (2013)
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The Shape of Rome (2013)
Author : simonebrunozzi
Score : 173 points
Date : 2021-04-11 10:56 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.exurbe.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.exurbe.com)
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I was curious how the deconstruction of the Via dei Fori
| Imperiali was going since then.
| https://romeonrome.com/2015/02/the-life-and-death-of-via-dei...
| was the best I found.
| lvice wrote:
| I live in Rome, so I can give a bit of feedback on it. The road
| has been turned to pedestrian-only since August 2013 by the
| mayor Marino. It has been like that ever since. There is
| currently no plan for deconstruction, and the future of the
| road is still up to debate. I think it makes for a very nice
| walk in the heart of Rome, with plenty of space for tourists to
| wonder around without being cramped.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Thanks! Anything in English about the latest twists and turns
| for the debate? Is that new metro now open?
| africanboy wrote:
| Roman here, living in the area near Colosseum: the road still
| exists but has been pedonalized by Marino and it made the
| archeological park completely different.
|
| Now people can safely walk around, the only allowed vehicles are
| public buses and archeological excavation have become a prominent
| activity in the area.
|
| it's still messy because the new subway tunnels are taking a lot
| longer to be built than planned (that's quite normal in Rome
| unfortunately) but it's many times better than it was before when
| the main users where cars and traffic jams.
| tathagatadg wrote:
| our guide told us there used to be traffic jams in ancient Rome
| as well - when we were standing at the traffic light waiting to
| cross the road. so humbling to feel a thousand year back
| someone might be standing at the exact place waiting to cross
| the road and get into the Colosseum for the games ...
| [deleted]
| occamrazor wrote:
| (2013) And obviously the project has been quietly discarded and
| forgotten.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I met Ignazio Marino once, liked him a lot, and been following
| his short stint as mayor of Rome.
|
| Unfortunately for him, the back-then Prime Minister, Renzi,
| decided to drop support for him, pushed by many interest groups
| (some say even the roman mafia), angry at Marino for wanting to
| disrupt old balances of power.
|
| A pity. He would have done great things for Rome.
| africanboy wrote:
| > Unfortunately for him, the back-then Prime Minister, Renzi,
| decided to drop support for him
|
| I think this narrative has spread too much and has become one
| of those lies that repeated indefinitely become truths.
|
| Marino had a problem: he wasn't a long time memmber of PD
| (Democratic Party) of Rome, they had another candidate but
| Marino beat him at the primaries and became mayor of Rome.
|
| So they started the war against him.
|
| Renzi simply acknowledged that the roman PD was a nest of
| vipers and put a commissar (Orfini) to handle the transition.
|
| But it wasn't Renzi that created Mafia capitale where members
| of PD were involved with bipartisan criminals of Rome (like
| Tassoni in Ostia that was in bed with the gipsy-mob family
| Spada)
|
| I'm also talking about corruption, years after it's clear
| that Renzi was right when che tried to reset the roman PD,
| his fault was not being able to actually clean the house
|
| https://roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/04/10/news/scandalo_.
| ..
|
| (sorry, Italian only)
|
| Also, Marino wasn't loved by romans because he had radicals
| ideas about modernizing the city and romans are generally
| resistant to changes and also because he made some bad
| communication mistake.
|
| I'm telling this as a roman who campaigned for Marino, voted
| for him and was happy having him as mayor.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I don't think that my statement about Renzi is in conflict
| with your explanation. I summarized it as "drop support for
| him", and avoided a longer explanation.
|
| I am roughly in agreement with your longer explanation.
| And, by the way: thanks for your work with his campaign; I
| wish he stayed and enacted these reforms.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Wait, do you mean that _Suburra_ is based on real
| characters?
| africanboy wrote:
| it was inspired by real events happened in Rome that go
| under the name of "mafia capitale"
|
| Suburra is also the name of an area in ancient Rome of
| lower class criminals and prostitution.
| Fede_V wrote:
| Excellent post, thank you.
| Fede_V wrote:
| I had a chance to speak to Marino when he came to give a talk
| about bioethics at my PhD institution. He was a very smart
| man - but he made several mistakes.
|
| For example - he made up a ridiculous story about being
| invited by the pope to attend a march in Philadelphia, which
| quickly got exposed as a lie. He was also completely unable
| to handle the local Roman political players / senior civil
| servants (who, granted, are hideously corrupt and have been
| running things for their own self dealings with left
| governments, center governments, far right governments, and 5
| star governments (whatever they are)).
| codesnik wrote:
| article is from 2013. And the road still stands.
| asymmetric wrote:
| From 2013 (not that it matters that much, given the scale of
| events TFA is about)
| xyzelement wrote:
| I read this article in 2013 and made sure to visit that multi-
| layered church when in Rome in 2014. Well worth the visit and so
| easy to miss.
| [deleted]
| billfruit wrote:
| Not entirely related, the Formula E is racing today in the
| streets of Rome, in the area near Piazza Marconi. Very visually
| appealing street circuit for the race.
| africanboy wrote:
| the place were the race is taking place is called EUR
| (Esposizione Universale Roma Universal Rome Exposition in
| English), the neighborhood that was built for the universal
| exposition of 1942 that never happened due to World war 2.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUR,_Rome
| tartoran wrote:
| > When archaeologists opened up the under layer, they found a
| Madonna, probably 8th century, which then decayed before their
| eyes (horror!) due to exposure to the air.
|
| There is a scene of this in Frederico Fellinni's Roma if anyone
| has patience for a 2 hour long comedic dramatic film in which the
| main character of the film is Rome itself
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Sidewalks in Rome are worst I've ever seen. Even in Russia, where
| roads "quality" is a joke for locals, sidewalks are more usable.
| In Rome, sidewalk might disappear suddenly and you are on the
| road with the baby carriage and cars around you.
| usrusr wrote:
| It's far from the only city with bad sidewalks. It more than
| made it up for me that just like in most other cities, manhole
| covers and the like carry the insignia of the local communal
| administration. Here: S.P.Q.R. - suddenly branding efforts of
| Apple, Nike, the Coca Cola Company and so on seemed almost
| amateurish.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Far from what? I didn't say "the only".
| doogerdog wrote:
| S.P.Q.R. is one of the oldest current brands, comes from the
| Roman Empire. Translates from latin to "The Senate and the
| people of Rome" I worked there for a year in 1974. Italians
| visiting from other parts of Italy claimed it stood for "Sono
| Porci Questi Romani". I love that city, need to find time to
| go back.
| pmontra wrote:
| The Italian translation of the Asterix comics makes the
| Gauls spell it as "Sono Pazzi Questi Romani", these Romans
| are crazy. Asterix became popular at about the time you
| were working in Rome. I guess that this translation is the
| most popular one nowadays. Of course we know it's Senatus
| Popolusque Romanorum.
| adamjb wrote:
| The mention of looted columns reminded me of the Great Mosque of
| Cordoba. Its famous double tiered arcades were purely pragmatic
| height creating compromise as a result of the local Roman and
| Visigothic columns not being tall enough for the large interior
| space.
|
| At least, that was the case when the mosque was built in the 8th
| century. When the mosque was expanded [0] on several occasions
| over the next few centuries they made sure to commission new
| copies of the columns. Why? So they could build double arcades
| just like Abd al-Rahman I. A pragmatic solution copied not out of
| pragmatism, but in order to claim legitimacy through aesthetic
| continuation (much like every neoclassical building ever).
|
| [0] Friday mosques traditionally have to have enough capacity to
| contain the entire Muslim population for the Friday prayer, so as
| the city grows so must the mosque.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Great piece! I love how the author structures the post, taking us
| into the structure and all of it's subsequent layers down on
| through historical time.
|
| I rolled my eyes at Freud's mention, in the eyes of such immense
| ancient culture, here we are still talking about a second rate
| scientist who falsified evidence and set psychology back 50
| years.
| watwut wrote:
| Yeah, it is odd how stuck some people are on Freud. It is
| outdated artefact of time before us even attempting science.
| hexxiiiz wrote:
| Psychology has set itself back 50 years. After disavowing all
| of Freud's ideas, psychology has spent decades constructing a
| piecemeal web of unreproducible experiments only to conclude on
| a lot of ideas that Freud had already developed: that the mind
| is driven by unconscious processes, that trauma has a enduring
| impact on these processes that lead to pathologies, etc...
| Today a lot of neuroscientists are picking up where Freud left
| off: Solms, Friston, Carhart-Harris, ...
|
| Research in this area was initiated in some ways by an
| extensive paper by nobel laureate neuroscientist Eric Kandel
| outlining the ways in which many of Freud's ideas could be
| reaserched from a modern neuroscientific perspective. In this
| paper
| https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/ajp.156.4....
| Kandel asserts that psychoanalysis today still offers the most
| intellectually satisfying model of the mind and builds on this
| contention to suggest the various frontiers upon which it can
| be investigated with neuroscientific tools.
|
| I think Freud has gained a tremendously distorted image among a
| public that eschews actually reading his ideas directly,
| instead accepting out of hand a strewn-together strawman
| erected from third hand accounts of them. I would suggest at
| least reading Freud's 1915 essay "the Unconscious".
| [deleted]
| pmichaud wrote:
| Thank you for this. Freud has a bad reputation among people
| who know nothing, but he was flawed genius who gave us the
| basis for what we do know about the mind. He's only
| remembered for the goofy parts because the rest is just "how
| things obviously work"---obvious, of course, only after his
| work.
| SergeAx wrote:
| > Via dei Fori Imperiali, a grand boulevard running along the
| Forum and around the Capitoline, which Mussolini built so he
| could have processions, and to declare to the world how sure he
| was that no one would care about the Roman relics he was paving
| over
|
| My guide in Rome, historian and avid city explorer, told me, that
| Mussolini wanted to extend might and glory of Ancient Rome into
| XX century, not to made it obsolete and forgotten. One of the
| purposes of Via dei Fori Imperiali was for him to have a view of
| Colosseum from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, where he used to
| deliver his speeches.
| gred wrote:
| Interesting read. The Basilica of San Clemente, which the author
| spends some time describing, was the basis for the fictional
| "Basilica di San Tommaso" in Ngaio Marsh's 1970 novel "When in
| Rome" -- a nice read for those who enjoy the murder mystery
| genre, history and archaeology.
| raphaelj wrote:
| This is one of the best read I had in a long time. Too bad the
| pictures are not in higher definition.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| What's always impressed me is the expense borne by ancient Roman
| and Greek civilization to use such durable building materials,
| like marble.
|
| As the article notes, even the first buildings in Rome, in the
| archaic period, used the distictively Roman red terra cotta
| bricks.
| adamjb wrote:
| This is a rather textbook example of survivorship bias
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Yes, there's probably a major element of that giving me this
| impression. However, we have a lot of surviving Roman
| structures compared to Celtic or Germanic structures, for
| example.
|
| 3D reconstructions of ancient Rome show a city that relies
| heavily on stone, concrete and marble in its construction:
|
| https://youtu.be/8Wuwa3UllKA
|
| Though this too could be a consequence of survivorship bias.
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