Plan of Ancient Rome

This print appears early in the first volume of Piranesi’s Le Antichità Romane, following the dedicatory frontispiece and the standard preface and imprimatur, which provided proof that the papacy had granted proper permission for the publication. This plan of Rome begins a lengthy section on two specific types of ancient Roman fragments. The etched plates and printed text that follow work together to index the surviving ruins of ancient Roman monuments known in the eighteenth century and the fragments of an ancient marble plan of Rome known as the Severan Marble Plan, or the Forma urbis romae. Fragments of the Severan Plan were discovered in 1562 but had recently been put on public display at the Capitoline Museums. This fragmentary evidence of ancient Rome’s urban layout influenced early modern cartographers and antiquarians, who attempted to reconstruct Roman topography from extant ruins and writings from antiquity.

Piranesi was well acquainted with the Severan fragments, and frequently drew inspiration from them for his own plans and images of antiquity. In this image, Piranesi scatters pieces of the marble plan around a map of the walled city. The numbers that appear alongside the marble fragments correspond to entries in the detailed index that follows, in which Piranesi lists each surviving fragment and posits its identity and location in the city. The map of Rome in the center of the print represents ancient monuments as they appeared in Piranesi’s day. The small numbers that label these sites link the reader to entries on subsequent pages. Here, Piranesi’s Rome emerges from the old fragments. Later in Le Antichità Romane and other publications, Piranesi would inscribe his reconstructed plans on slabs of fragmented marble, often illusionistically held to the surface with metal clamps.