Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Antichità

In 2005 the former Chair of Archeology and History of Greek and Roman Art (professor A. Carandini), obtained a grant from the Commissione Infrastrutture Cultura to build a web portal that would allow online use of a virtual cognitive itinerary of the ancient city of Rome (Imago Urbis). The project could count on the experience accumulated by the proponent and the scientific team he directed in over ten years of previous research, dedicated to the reconstruction of the urban and agrarian landscapes of the city of Rome and her hinterland, from the mid-9th century BC in the middle of the 6th century AD. In this activity, for the first time, a systematic and global approach to the knowledge and reconstruction of the ancient world was favoured, merging in urban contexts and series of contexts the landscapes of ancient Rome, buildings of all kinds, objects registered and not, decorations and literary sources.

Thanks to this research, an Archaeological Information System was created. It contains:

• all the archaeological data related to the city of Rome (within the Aurelian Walls), collected from published and unpublished news (in particular the data merged into the preparatory files of the "Archeological Charter of Rome" preserved in the Historical Archive of Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma at Palazzo Altemps)
• literary and epigraphic sources related to places and buildings of the city
• the ancient iconographic sources and the main iconographic sources of the modern age related to places and buildings of the city
• the main historical urban cartography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• videos made for the project.

These data are organized in such a way as to be accepted and consulted on a web-gis platform, structured to be accessible online (internet or network).

Thanks to an agreement between the University and the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma, it was also possible to exchange information relating to the discoveries made up to 2001, stored both in our and in Soprintendenza System (SITAR).

The research allowed to reconstruct the sequence of urban landscapes of ancient Rome from the mid-9th century BC to the mid-6th century AD and to reconstruct the main phases of the public and private buildings of the city. This made it possible to elaborate a narrative of the history of the city organized into the XIV Regiones by Augustus in 7 BC. This work can be considered the first step to the institution of a museum, virtual or real, as the museums of the main European cities (London, Amsterdam, etc.). 

The result of these works is edited in A. Carandini and P. Carafa (eds.), Atlante di Roma Antica.  Biografia e ritratti della città, voll. 1-2, Electa, Milano 2012.

Since 2012, we updated the Archaeological System and, in 2017, we edited a new version in English of the Atlas. The two volumes were published by Princeton University Press in July 2017; a further updated edition was published in October of the same year. In this new edition, we have been able to add the archaeological discoveries between 2012 and 2017; we had acquired the main publications relating to the city and its monuments; we had updated and/or revised some reconstructions and added new ones.

Since 2018, we have restructured the Archaeological Information System on a new platform. A new GeoDB has been created thanks to the collaboration with Professor Cristiano Pesaresi and Dr. Davide Pavia (Dipartimento di Scienze documentarie, linguistico-filologiche e geografiche, Sezione di Geografia ora Dipartimento di Lettere e Culture moderne, Facoltà di Scienze Umanistiche, Sapienza Univeristy of Rome).