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The First Scientific Mapping of the Ruins of Rome
This remarkable map of the Ruins of Ancient Rome set a new standard for mapping Rome’s ruins. The map records the city’s ancient remains exactly as they stood, without the imaginative “fill-ins” common to earlier antiquarian plans.
The map was created by architect-archaeologist Antonio De Romanis, who had recently completed his work documenting Nero’s Domus Aurea, and Antonio Nibby, soon to become Rome’s leading professor of archaeology. The map was engraved by Giovanni Acquaroni, with this first edition dedicated to Pope Pius VII, whose pontificate had revived excavation after the Napoleonic years.
What makes the map most significant is its evidence-first method. De Romanis and Nibby plotted only what they could measure: the outlines of temples, baths, forums, and broken walls visible in 1819. Gaps in knowledge remain blank rather than being “restored” from imagination. Around the border they reproduced fragments of the third-century Forma Urbis Severiana, the marble map of ancient Rome, so viewers could see the primary sources underpinning the plan. This transparent citation of proof marked a decisive break from artists like Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose magnificent 18th-century maps freely mingled fact with fantasy.
The map emerged during a broader post-Enlightenment shift toward scientific archaeology. Scholars in Rome were beginning to marry literary study with systematic fieldwork, treating the city as an empirical dataset that could be updated as new digs progressed. Indeed, Monaldini issued a revised edition in 1826 with Nibby’s corrections and “latest discoveries,” underscoring the map’s purpose as a living research tool rather than a static souvenir.
By refusing conjecture and foregrounding hard evidence, Vestigie di Roma Antica became a cornerstone of modern topography. It offered scholars a reliable baseline of Rome’s ancient footprint and influenced later giants such as Rodolfo Lanciani, whose multi-sheet Forma Urbis Romae atlas of the 1890s built directly on this empirical tradition.
The 1819 map remains both a snapshot of the Eternal City two centuries ago and a milestone in the evolution of archaeological method, marking the moment when the study of Rome decisively pivoted from romantic antiquarianism to disciplined science.
