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The floor of Rome’s Colosseum, where gladiators once fought against each other and wild animals, is set to be restored to its former glory.
Milan Ingegneria, a structural engineering and architecture firm, has won an €18.5m (£16m) bid to build and install a retractable arena floor that will allow visitors “to see the majesty of the monument” from its centre, culture minister Dario Franceschini said on Sunday.
— The Guardian
Plans for the arena floor restoration of the Roman Colosseum (completed in AD80 under Emperor Titus) first appeared on Archinect in January. Concept for the new Colosseum arena floor. Video via MiC_Italia on YouTube. Milan Ingegneria's concept of a retractable arena floor allows the structure... View full entry
The Italian culture ministry is offering the €10 million project to the designer who can turn the clock back 2,000 years to when 35,000 Romans bayed for blood in the ancient stadium. — The Times
According to The Times, "Italy is looking for a brilliant engineer to reinstall the Colosseum arena floor, complete with trapdoors and the hidden lifts that allowed wild animals to leap out and menace gladiators." Previously on Archinect: Mayor-less Rome's logistical battle to invest in its... View full entry
Researchers said on Saturday they had discovered a frescoed thermopolium or fast-food counter in an exceptional state of preservation in Pompeii.
The ornate snack bar, decorated with polychrome patterns and frozen by volcanic ash, was partially exhumed last year but archaeologists extended work on the site to reveal it in its full glory.
— The Guardian
The astonishingly well preserved and nearly 2,000-year-old snack bar, or Thermopolium, in Pompeii's Regio V has re-emerged in its entirety, along with food residues, animal bones, and victims of the AD 79 volcanic eruption, following a lengthy excavation effort. View this post on Instagram A post... View full entry
The House of the Beautiful Courtyard at Herculaneum and the House of the Cryptoporticus in Pompeii will each be the site of a new installation by artist Catrin Huber, as part of a Newcastle University project designed to create a new dialogue between contemporary art, Roman wall painting and archaeological remains. — Apollo Magazine
Expanded Interiors at Herculaneum. Photo: Amedeo Benestante."By investigating two distinctive Roman houses, our project sets out an exchange of knowledge between old and new," the Expanded Interiors project website explains. "We are exploring what Contemporary painting and site-specific fine-art... View full entry
A major Roman settlement discovered south of Lyon in France is the “most exceptional excavation of a Roman site in 40 or 50 years”, says the chief archaeologist working on the project. Benjamin Clément, who works for the Swiss conservation company Archeodunum, is leading a team of 15 archaeologists at the dig in Saint Colombe, a small town near the city of Vienne. — The Art Newspaper
The well-preserved ancient Roman neighborhood, dubbed "Little Pompeii" by the archaeologists, covers an area of almost 7,000 square meters (75,000 square feet) and was discovered during construction of a housing complex near the city of Vienne. View full entry
Modern, steel-embedded concrete seawalls tend to need repair after a few decades of erosion from the endless procession of waves, but the Roman pier at Portus Cosanus in Orbetello, Italy has remained solid for almost two thousand years. Scientists have finally figured out the missing ingredient... View full entry
During an excavation for a new office development at 21 Lime Street, a team from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) found the millimeter-thin fresco nearly 20 feet below street level. Dating to the late 1st century AD, and the first decades of London, it’s one of the earliest surviving frescos from Roman Britain. [...]
The rare, ornate wall painting is likely to have decorated a reception room for party guests at the home of a wealthy Roman citizen.
— hyperallergic.com
A statement issued by MOLA explained, “The fate of this rare wall painting was literally sealed in the ground ... In AD 100, construction of the 2nd Forum Basilica, the main civic center for the city and the largest Roman building ever built north of the Alps, began. In advance of construction... View full entry
While some residents may be more concerned about their overflowing rubbish bins than maintaining ancient monuments, for many the survival of modern Rome will depend on the preservation of the past. — The Guardian
As Rome moves forward without a mayor, the city is taking on the restoration of both the Colosseum and the Porta Maggiore basilica while updating the modern city.More about Rome on Archinect:Was Rome really a "City of Marble"?A breakneck tour of contemporary architecture in RomeContemporary Art... View full entry
[The] extended tour [is] guided by renowned “virtual archaeologist” and overseer of the Rome Reborn project Dr. Bernard Frischer...in dialogue with Dr. Steven Zucker, whose...questions ensure that, while we take in the spectacle of Rome’s impressive architecture (to say nothing of its equally impressive aqueducts) as it looked back in 320, we also think about what the real flesh-and-blood people who once lived there actually did there... — Open Culture
Architectural historian Diane Favro of [UCLA], has employed advanced modeling software to reconstruct the city of Rome in its entirety over the period of the rule of Augustus Caesar, from 44 B.C. to A.D. 14. According to legend, Augustus boasted, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble”... She found that only a small proportion of the buildings in Augustan Rome were converted from brick to marble, and that they would have been difficult to see from ground level. — archaeology.org
Favro explains that while much of Rome was left untouched by Augustus' urban project, the traffic caused by bringing the large quantities of Carrera marble through the city likely created the illusion "that Rome had been transformed into marble." View full entry
