Mapping the Eternal City

Overview

The history of Rome is written in its maps. From the Forma Urbis - the massive marble map of Rome from the third century, which today only survives in fragments - to digitalised GPS-based renderings of the city, mapmakers have constructed and reconstructed Rome for their viewers.

Yet maps do not simply represent the buildings, streets and spaces in the city; they also bear the imprint of the values and aims of the cartographer. Maps speak, and even the simplest of them put forward an argument. Sometimes by their silence, they obliterate other interpretations.

Join historian Dr Brian Brennan to explore the “eternal city” through its wonderful maps from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, as well as the eighteenth and early twentieth century.