Learning from Rome:

Abstract

To walk through a city, stroll down a street, and pause in a public square is to be enveloped in history.1 But people typically pass through built environments without considering them as totalities of topography, architecture, and human history—like hiking a landscape without understanding its geology and ecology. Scholars, however, seek to grasp how and why humans have formed and re-formed built environments, preserving, altering, or destroying fabric over time. With the advent of digital, data-driven approaches and increasingly powerful mapping tools, can we better make sense of complex, historically rich built environments? The case of Rome offers an ideal opportunity to address this question. Often compared to a palimpsest, the Eternal City has historical layers that span millennia. Consider, for example, the modern-day Piazza Navona, the proportions and curved northern end of which recall the ancient Stadium of Domitian still partially present underground. The city is a vast archive and thus a huge challenge to comprehend in spatial and temporal terms. Freud famously used it as a metaphor for a memory that one could submerge in one's psyche but never fully expunge.2 Our question here concerns both urban history and architectural history. Whether one is more interested in the former or the latter, the first step is to know what was where, and when. This basic spatiotemporal knowledge is the foundation for any evidence-based historical exploration of the physical and social fabrics of the past. Here we present principles and examples of existing and potential digital approaches that enable scholars to tackle the challenges of studying complex built environments. We begin with a discussion of the early modern origins and the modern-day value of the spatiotemporal approach. We then turn to consider how data-driven approaches and digital maps benefit our discipline. Finally, we present case studies about …