Webinar: The Making of Modern Rome: A City Transformed by CICERONI Travel

CICERONI Travel

Synopsis

Following the defeat of Napoleon, visitors returned to Rome, recognising once again the city as an oasis of civilisation. Beginning with Pope Pius VII, who oversaw the return of stolen art and antiquities from France, nineteenth century pontiffs took great pride in, and care of the city’s monuments. The systematic excavation, consolidation and analysis of the ancient sites, including the Roman Forum, accelerated. Simultaneously, with the unification of Italy as a kingdom, and with Rome as its new capital from 1870, the most rapid urban transformation in the city’s history gathered pace. This culminated in the twentieth century with a daring new approach to the classical language of architecture and urban planning as the Fascist era of the 1920s and ‘30s sought to recreated the achievements of past emperors. James Hill concludes his series on the urban history of Rome tracing the changes which provided contemporary archaeology with extraordinary opportunities, presented against the dramatic political context as Rome moved from its status as capital of a Papal State to that of the new Kingdom of Italy, its future conditioned by both Fascism and the emergence of the modern Republic of Italy.

Lecturer

James Hill

James Hill is our long-standing Italian, US and Caribbean tours director. British born, he has been resident in Italy for over 28 years where he studied politics. An authority on travel and culture in Italy, he lives near Rome and has a background in travel writing and television production where he worked on around sixty cultural programmes and documentaries on Italy.

Series of two Lectures

On Demand

Lecture 1 - The Roman Question: Excavation & Foundation

Tuesday, June 1, 2021 · 11:00 AM BST

When Pope Pius VII returned to Rome in 1814 from Napoleonic ‘captivity’, he initiated the transformation of the city’s ancient monuments, clearing away not only the colonising flora and fauna, but also the domestic buildings and churches that had smothered triumphal arches, theatres and temples in past centuries. The Roman Forum began to be systematically excavated as pioneering archeologists traced the topography of the ancient city. Newly-discovered antiquities emerged from the earth as Rome’s status turned from that of a localised papal capital into a unified and regal one. The construction of new avenues, widened thoroughfares, enlarged piazzas and the civic buildings associated with central government altered the city forever. Simultaneously, a wider ‘Roman Question’ emerged as successive popes, no longer ruling from the Quirinal Palace, but in self-exile within the walls of the Vatican, observed the Rome they had presided over for centuries changing all around them.

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On Demand

Lecture 2 - ‘The Third Rome’: Antiquity, Architecture & Artifice

Tuesday, June 8, 2021 · 11:00 AM BST

At the beginning of the twentieth century the River Tiber was dammed and banked, new suburbs such as Prati were modelled on Turin’s grid plan lay-out, and the ancient quarter round the Vatican, the Borgo, was divided by a long thoroughfare deliberately separating church from state, the Vatican from the new Rome, the ironically named Via della Conciliazioni. Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ in 1922 heralded darker times for the city, the nation and Italy’s international standing. Indeed, a new ‘Rubicon’ had been crossed, and the glorification of his rule, reflecting that of the emperors, was rarely far from Il Duce’s rhetoric, manifesting itself in the fervent archeological and architectural activity of the 1920s and ‘30s. Grandiose urban projects classicised established architectural settings, sweeping away irreplaceable remnants of Rome’s past. This ‘stripped-down’ language of classicism is today what is left of Mussolini’s ‘Third Rome’, silent, but ever present.

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