The Shape of Rome (2013)
exurbe.com
exurbe.com
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.
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
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.
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.
Suburra is also the name of an area in ancient Rome of lower class criminals and prostitution.
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.
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)).
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.
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.
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".
As the article notes, even the first buildings in Rome, in the archaic period, used the distictively Roman red terra cotta bricks.
3D reconstructions of ancient Rome show a city that relies heavily on stone, concrete and marble in its construction:
Though this too could be a consequence of survivorship bias.
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.