Rome was not built in a day, so goes a saying. All Roads led to Rome. Rome was an eternal City. Pax Romana meant peace throughout the Roman kingdom. The seat of ancient culture. The glory of Greece, the grandeur of Rome, the splendour of Italy, the Wonder that is India, is how, the greatness of the past cities and countries are recaptured by historical personalities. Rome’s precarious architectural birthright is crumbling?
The country is bidding for 2020 Olympics. It would be an occasion to update Italy’s capital. Contemporary architecture now promises to be the new engine and symbol of a new creative identity for Rome that, if development is done right for a change, would complement the City’s hoary and glorious past.
What has the polity contributed to the up-keep of the City’s marvels? A nation whose identity and fiscal survival rests on it now devotes 0.21% of its budget, and this percentage has been dropping, which is about one-fifth of the percentage that French devotes, to theatre, films, exhibitions, music and museums, not to mention the upkeep of all those thousands of historical sites for which there is no master conservation Plan. The City that has a swanky 3.7 million inhabitants and growing, almost everybody outside the historic Rome, where its past is crumbling?
How to balance the old with the new? It’s a familiar quandary. A highway built by Mussolini, if both ends could be architecturally connected, the one side an immense Congress Centre (designed by Massimiliano Fuksas), retain the Luigi Pigorini Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography, a 1930 glory of limestone, stained glass, light and air, epitomizing the modernizing aspirations of an early day, while on the other side, new apartment blocks are to be built.
Antiquarian Domus Aureau, the Golden Villa that Nero built near the Colosseum, a vaulted gallery collapsed. Most of the frescoes are threatened. After this, some chunks fell off the Colosseum. The true Rome, with its imperial past, giant refreshing architectural marvels, is part of history, and the peripheral city that can come up can hardly be called Greater Rome. New Rome, Old Rome, and whatever name it is called, has a duty cast on its city rulers to maintaining the city’s prized but crumbling archaeological sites. Rome is eternal. But somebody has to keep it that way.
The country is bidding for 2020 Olympics. It would be an occasion to update Italy’s capital. Contemporary architecture now promises to be the new engine and symbol of a new creative identity for Rome that, if development is done right for a change, would complement the City’s hoary and glorious past.
What has the polity contributed to the up-keep of the City’s marvels? A nation whose identity and fiscal survival rests on it now devotes 0.21% of its budget, and this percentage has been dropping, which is about one-fifth of the percentage that French devotes, to theatre, films, exhibitions, music and museums, not to mention the upkeep of all those thousands of historical sites for which there is no master conservation Plan. The City that has a swanky 3.7 million inhabitants and growing, almost everybody outside the historic Rome, where its past is crumbling?
How to balance the old with the new? It’s a familiar quandary. A highway built by Mussolini, if both ends could be architecturally connected, the one side an immense Congress Centre (designed by Massimiliano Fuksas), retain the Luigi Pigorini Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography, a 1930 glory of limestone, stained glass, light and air, epitomizing the modernizing aspirations of an early day, while on the other side, new apartment blocks are to be built.
Antiquarian Domus Aureau, the Golden Villa that Nero built near the Colosseum, a vaulted gallery collapsed. Most of the frescoes are threatened. After this, some chunks fell off the Colosseum. The true Rome, with its imperial past, giant refreshing architectural marvels, is part of history, and the peripheral city that can come up can hardly be called Greater Rome. New Rome, Old Rome, and whatever name it is called, has a duty cast on its city rulers to maintaining the city’s prized but crumbling archaeological sites. Rome is eternal. But somebody has to keep it that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment