Rome AD 69: The City at the Crossroads

The radical transformation of the republican city had started with Augustus who, in forty years of ruling, had created that “city of marble” (more than one hundred documented monumental, building and infrastructural works) which, in symbolic and substantial terms, constituted the foundation of the new imperial capital. After Augustus, the Julio-Claudian emperors had acted in the vein of continuity and dynastic legitimationHowever, only Nero had the ambition – and the opportunity – to conceive a consistent urban project for the centre of Rome. His unfinished legacy influenced the monumental building activity of the Flavians who, at the crossroads between Augustan classicism and the Hellenizing utopia of Nero, interpreted it according to their specific perspectives, and passed it on to the Antonines and the Severans