La distruzione del tessuto medievale a Roma tra XIX e XX secolo. Una proposta di metodo per restituire la consistenza della forma medievale della città

Several studies have focused on identifying the layout of medieval Roma streets. A part of them is associated with the apparent topographic matrix, and another with the precise restitution of delimited urban areas. Additionally, some specific investigations - at different levels of accuracy - have studied the paths of the main streets that opened in the historic centre in the 19th and 20th centuries, describing the destructive effects and the substitution of the urban buildings. In this article, we examine the possibility of a new investigation strategy, evaluating the medieval road network at the level of the concrete consistency of urban volumes and voids. With this aim, we chose to consider the area of the Tiber bight, particularly regarding the central-southern sector of Campo Marzio. This is a significant sample of the historical town - which has already been analysed by scholars from different disciplines - organised around two of the three main supporting axes spreading out from the “canale di Ponte”, the Elio bridge. The bridge connected the St. Peter Basilica with the other shore of the river, while the so-called “via Papalis” reached the northern slope of Campidoglio continuing anent the Colosseum to the Lateran Basilica and the “via Peregrinorum” leaded toward the St. Paul Basilica at south-west. Based on the assumption that the reconfiguration of the medieval form of the town involves a recognition of the physical reality of the pre-modern urban tissue, the operation carried out includes a graphing of the late medieval building persistence based on a certain cartographic representation, transferring the knowledge acquired through various sources to the drawn image in a “regressive” manner.