ID AND LOCATION
| Stanford #
| 563a |
| AG1980 #
| 563a |
| PM1960 #
| 563 |
| Slab #
| unknown |
| Adjoins
| 563b |
CONDITION
| Located
| false |
| Incised
| true |
| Surviving
| true |
| Subfragments
| 1 |
| Plaster Parts
| 0 |
| Back Surface
| smooth |
| Slab Edges
| 0 |
| Clamp Holes
| 0 |
| Tassello
| no |
TECHNICAL INFO
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| ANALYSIS
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| Description A wide street traverses the large fragment from bottom left to upper right. At top right, it widens to become a piazza. It is intersected along its course on the right by three smaller streets or alleys; these divide the architecture on the right side of the street into four groups. Bottom left group consists of corner tabernae, fronted by an arcade along the wide street. Next is a triangular section of tabernae. A rectangular courtyard, surrounded on three sides by tabernae, follows. At the bottom this building is framed by a simple wall. Last on the right is another rectangular courtyard building. It is framed on all four sides by tabernae and a smaller rectangle is centered within. These four buildings are flanked at the bottom by a shop-lined street that runs parallel to the wide street first mentioned. On the left side of the wide street a series of rectilinear structures is visible. Top right lies a building that is fronted by a row of tabernae with back rooms, each accessible from the wide street. Other rows can be seen behind it, but these are only accessible from a long corridor that spans the width of the end of the building. The open area between this building and the next is walled off from the wide street by a wall. A long row of tabernae back onto this open space, perpendicular to the wide street. It faces another row of shops, separated from the first row by a long corridor which is blocked off from the wide street by the same wall that blocked off the open space to the right. This section is only accessible from the wide street via a small opening in the bottommost room on the left. Center left, more shops face the wide street. A wide opening in this sequence of shops opens onto a peristyle.
Identification Most of the rooms visible in this fragment seem to be tabernae of the type most commonly depicted on the FUR. Each shop consisted of a single room with a wide opening towards the street that could be screened off at night. The owners may have resided with their families on a wooden platform in the back of the shop. Some of these rows frame large courtyards which may have been of common use for the shops' owners and their families. These may have functioned as work spaces or simply as extra living spaces. The rectangle inside the courtyard structure on the far right may represent a covered arcade or a large basin. The courtyard barely visible at center left was colonnaded, an extra luxury added to an already desirable space in the crowded city. The tabernae at top right have back rooms. These were almost certainly used by the shop owner and his family for residential spaces. The opening to the front room of the shop would have been closed off with a wooden screen or a curtain. The restricted access to the two rows of rooms that face each other across a corridor at top left may indicate that this was a storage facility, perhaps for grain (horrea). It fits the type of horrea which has been classified as Type 1: These consisted simply of rows of rooms that face each other across a narrow courtyard or corridor, and access was restricted to a small opening in one end (Staccioli 1962, pp. 91-92, with examples in fig. 1; Rickman 1971, pp. 120-121). The luxury of having an arcade in front of a row of shops as in the bottom left of this fragment was apparently not restricted to such grandiose areas as the slopes of the Palatine, facing the Circus Maximus (see fr. 8bde). Frs. 33abc, 34a, 34b and 34c depict a large, predominantly commercial area by the Tiber which abounds with rows of tabernae and arcades. This fragment probably belongs in such an area. The lack of staircases or ramps and the relatively rectilinear layout of the architecture suggest it was located in a flat area of Rome.
Significance This fragment is typical of non-identified fragments of the Plan. No monumental buildings are represented, and the fragment instead provides a view of the lesser known structures that made up the urban fabric of Rome: the residential and commercial buildings. The strong skewing of the architecture in the bottom left corner, in contrast to the rectilinearity of the rest of the fragment, was probably caused when the Roman map makers mosaicked together the surveys of different sections of the city. |
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| 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 |
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| KEYWORDS
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| colonnade, peristyle, courtyards, tabernae, street, arcade, horrea, warehouses |
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