“To be or not be” Image credit: Image from an installation designed by Cresarc Architects. Photograph taken by Naveen Mahantesh.
“All roads leading to Rome are now expressways” In the 1972 film Roma, Fellini presents different mood pieces that represent his perceptions of the city; how it was perceived in his childhood, his first encounter of the city later and several other mood pieces that are typical to the city of Rome. The film builds itself through short but deeply rooted narratives of Rome’s theatre culture, military fascism, prostitution, the world war, religion, sexuality, fashion and archaeology of its time. Rome has strict conservation laws that protect any material evidence of its past that is encountered in the present, through whatever means, and also requires it to be studied and archived. City engineers work with the archaeologists on all infrastructure projects, with each excavation for construction treated as a chance encounter for archaeology. Infrastructural concerns of Rome become an impetus for building its historical past. In the film Roma, Fellini documents archaeology as a perpetual and prevalent condition within the future of the city, but also proposes speleology as its sister concern. Each excavation is not perceived as breaking of a virgin ground, but a careful dissection of fertile and pregnant land. “That is not an elephant’s tusk, young man; it was on a mammoth that died here thousands of years ago. We discovered it when we were tunnelling under Piazza Radio Roma…. ….the Roman subsoil is unpredictable. Every hundred yards you come across something of historical significance, and of course, this affects our work. It is an enormously complicated job, because at the start, all we wanted to do was solve a traffic problem by building a subway along the lines of those built in Munich and Copenhagen. But the subsoil here has eight layers, so we had to become experts in archaeology as well as speleology….” - A transcript from Roma, 1972. In 1972, the movie depicted the discovery of an old Roman villa during a subway excavation. It had bright coloured frescoes that quickly deteriorate from exposure to air that is caused by the excavation. The latest such non-fictional encounter in Rome has resulted in what will be the first archaeological subway station. If overhead train tracks provide a ‘flying flaneur’s view’ of the city and archaeological museums provide spaces for timeless consumption of artefacts, the archaeological stations could provide a new urban condition where 2000 year old Roman frescoes become “urban art” and engaging with such relics are fleeting moments in a train ride.
June 2016 | CITY OBSERVER
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