Topography of ancient Rome

The topography of ancient Rome is a multidisciplinary field of study that draws on archaeology, epigraphy, cartography and philology.

The classic English-language work of scholarship is A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929), written by Samuel Ball Platner, completed and published after his death by Thomas Ashby. New finds and interpretations have rendered many of Platner and Ashby's conclusions unreliable, but when used with other sources the work still offers insights and complementary information.

In 1992, Lawrence Richardson published A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, which builds on Platner and Ashby. The six-volume, multilingual Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae (1993‑2000) is the major modern work in the field.

Ancient Roman topography as a systematic field of study began with the Italian Renaissance. The humanists express both a sense of rupture from the classical past brought about by the "Dark Ages" and a desire to rediscover antiquity. The renewed interest in classical texts, facilitated by the new technology of the printing press, was paralleled by inquiry into the physical monuments of ancient Rome, coinciding with a contemporary building boom in the city.

Among the early topographers of ancient Rome were the 15th-century humanists Poggio Bracciolini and Flavio Biondo. Poggio's De varietate fortunae ("On the Vagaries of Fortune") was a nostalgic and moralizing evocation of a lost Rome of triumphs, spectacles, and grand monuments, but it also contained detailed descriptions of temples, baths, arches, amphitheaters and other landmarks as artifacts subject to intellectual inquiry, in contrast to medieval mirabilia literature. Poggio researched ancient texts such as Frontinus's work On the Water Supply of the City of Rome and examined inscriptions, compiling a volume of epigraphy from ancient monuments: "Through such diligence, Poggio pioneered the way to reconstruct in historically accurate terms the topographical reality of the ancient city."

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