ID AND LOCATION
| Stanford #
| 559 |
| AG1980 #
| 559 |
| PM1960 #
| 559 |
| Slab #
| unknown |
| Adjoins
| none |
CONDITION
| Located
| false |
| Incised
| true |
| Surviving
| true |
| Subfragments
| 1 |
| Plaster Parts
| 0 |
| Back Surface
| smooth |
| Slab Edges
| 1 |
| Clamp Holes
| 0 |
| Tassello
| no |
TECHNICAL INFO
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ANALYSIS
|
| Description The fragment was part of a slab edge. It depicts four parallel rows of equal-sized tabernae, all bordered on the right by a perpendicular wall. The second row from the top is divided in the middle by a wide passage; this row consists of back-to-back shops. The bottom two rows are separated from each other by a passageway. Of these, the top row faces up, the bottom row faces down.
Identification Rows of tabernae are ubiquitous on the Plan, and the type depicted here are of the most common type seen on the FUR. Each shop consisted of a single room with a wide opening towards the street that could be screened off at night. In some shops, the owners probably resided with their families on a wooden platform in the back of the room. The shops depicted here, however, are quite small and may have been strictly for commercial use. The authors of PM 1960 suggest tentatively that they were part of a grain storage complex, or horrea (PM 1960, p. 149). The closely spaced rows in this fragment, however, are not that similar to the great horrea depicted for example in fr. 25a, which consist of store rooms surrounding and facing a central court, and may simply be rows of tabernae in a crowded commercial area.
Significance No monumental buildings are represented here, and the fragment instead provides a view of the lesser known, but equally important structures that made up the urban fabric of Rome: the commercial buildings.
|
|
| HISTORY OF FRAGMENT |
| Like the majority of FUR fragments, this piece was discovered in 1562 in a garden behind the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian. From here, it was transferred to the Palazzo Farnese and stored there. It was not among the fragments that were reproduced in the Renaissance drawings that are now kept in the Vatican, but Giovanni Pietro Bellori included it in his 1673 publication. In 1742, the fragment was moved to the Capitoline Museums and exhibited with some of the other known fragments in wooden frames along the main staircase. Since then, it has been stored with the other FUR fragments in various places: the storerooms of the Capitoline Museums (1903-1924), the Antiquarium Comunale (1924-1939), the Capitoline Museums again (1939-1955), the Palazzo Braschi (1955-1998), and since 1998 in the Museo della Civiltà Romana in EUR under the auspices of the Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali del Comune di Roma. (This fragments history corresponds to Iter E as summarized in PM 1960, p. 56.)
Text by Tina Najbjerg |
|
| KEYWORDS
|
| tabernae |
|
Prev
