A PIAZZA-EFFECT FOR THE LAYERED CITY. The enhancement of Augustus’ Mausoleum in the drawings of Francesco Cellini

Drawing and History are two important keys to understanding the work of Francesco Cellini, a Roman de-signer who often found himself having to deal with the past and within contexts of great historical im-portance. The competition for Piazza Augusto Imperatore in Rome, won in 2006, proposes a strong urban solution to a site that perhaps even more than others in the Capital has seen the alternation of overlays, rethinkings and impairments over the centuries. From solemn Memorial of Augustus and of the Gens Iu-lia, the Mausoleum has become a quarry of materials, then an eighteenth-century theater (the so-called Corea), to return to the original volume during the Twenties with the demolitions and the following con-struction of the Piazza and the buildings by Ballio Morpurgo, up to the recent realization of the Ara Pacis Museum by Meier (2006). The project of the group led by Francesco Cellini respects the instances of such a strong layering, as high-lighted by some CAD drawings - elaborated by Cellini himself - in which the mathematical precision of the informatic tool succeeds in restoring the accuracy of the various archaeological remains in relation to the competition proposal. Avoiding "fencing" the site, an action that would have strengthened an anachronis-tic isolation - as happened in other areas of central Rome (like in Largo di Torre Argentina) - the interven-tion aims to accompany the visitor towards the Augustan altitude through a stairway that becomes a vital square harmoniously integrated with such a compound context. The clean lines and the use of the black and white in Cellini's drawings help us to understand the attention given to the staircase as an element connecting the new with the ancient: in the bird's eye view presented, the neighbouring buildings of Bal-lio Morpurgo are barely sketched while the volume of the Mausoleum and that of the churches of San Rocco all'Augusteo and of the Santi Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso, portrayed in a very detailed way, take on the strength of concrete objects and interact each other in a context of pure diagrammatic abstraction.