[HN Gopher] The Shape of Rome (2013) ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-04-11 23:00 UTC)