ID AND LOCATION
| Stanford #
| 564abcd |
| AG1980 #
| 564a-d |
| PM1960 #
| 564 a-d |
| Slab #
| unknown |
| Adjoins
| none |
CONDITION
| Located
| false |
| Incised
| true |
| Surviving
| true |
| Subfragments
| 4 |
| Plaster Parts
| 0 |
| Back Surface
| smooth |
| Slab Edges
| 2 |
| Clamp Holes
| 0 |
| Tassello
| no |
TECHNICAL INFO
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| ANALYSIS
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| Description The four joined fragments formed the corner of a slab. On the left side of the group, an isolated row of back-to-back tabernae is flanked on the right, and perhaps on the left, by a covered arcade. On the far left, more shops face this row and yet another row of shops is located to the right, parallel to the back-to-back tabernae. These last shops face some unidentifiable structure across a narrow corridor. The buildings on the left side of the fragment are separated from those on the right by a street. This street makes a right turn and thus separates the two buildings visible on the right. The building at the bottom right seems to be walled in completely. The "wall" in front may, however, represent the edge of a sidewalk as opposed to a tall wall. A row of shops faces right and up, and these shops back onto one long room. The bottom shop within this sequence contains a staircase. Other long, narrow rooms are located in the left side of the building. The top right part of this fragment group is occupied by a series of long, narrow rooms with openings facing the wide street below. Partial doorway opening incisions barely visible on the extreme edge of 564a seem to suggest two rows of back-to-back rooms, with their common wall no longer visible along the fractured boundary between 564a and 564b.The lines that depict these rooms are deeper than anywhere else in the fragment group.
The back surface of the fragment cluster is generally smooth, although there is an unusual 11 centimeter wide rough strip along the longer slab edge. E. Rodríguez-Almeida notes that the marble fractures along the sides of subfragment 564d and between subfragments 564b and 564c occur in line with the marble veining (AG 1980, p. 13 and fig. 3).
Identification Rows of tabernae are ubiquitous on the Plan, and those 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. The owners may have resided with their families on a wooden platform in the back of the shop.
The luxury of having an arcade in front of a row of shops as in 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. The function of the long, narrow rooms with especially deep engravings is uncertain. Were they perhaps part of imperial warehouses and therefore needed to stand out from the surrounding architecture?
Significance This fragment is typical of non-identified fragments of the Plan in that no monumental buildings are represented. The fragment instead provides a view of the lesser known structures that made up the urban fabric of Rome: the residential and/or commercial buildings. The elongated spaces, however, remain an enigma. They were probably of commercial use. |
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| HISTORY OF FRAGMENT |
| The provenance of fr. a is uncertain (PM 1960, p. 149). Frs. b, c, and d were, like the majority of FUR fragments, discovered in 1562 in a garden behind the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian. From here, they were transferred to the Palazzo Farnese and stored there. They were not among the fragments that were reproduced in the Renaissance drawings that are now kept in the Vatican, but Giovanni Pietro Bellori included them in his 1673 publication. In 1742, the fragments were moved to the Capitoline Museums and exhibited with some of the other known fragments in wooden frames along the main staircase. Since then, they have 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. (The history of fragments b-d corresponds to Iter E as summarized in PM 1960, p. 56.)
Text by Tina Najbjerg and David Koller |
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| KEYWORDS
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| tabernae, arcades |
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