Città sepolte e rovine nel mondo greco e romano

Based on the archaeological evidence from the Greek and Roman worlds (Athens, Troy, Rome, etc.), there were many landscapes with remains from previous eras with which the natives coexisted. Massimiliano Papini explores the value and significance that ruins or antique monuments might have already had in antiquity. He accompanies us on an historical journey and investigates times and places in which the ruins had a special meaning. For example, between the eighth and seventh centuries BC, what we now call the 'age of Homer', the Greeks established a simultaneously distant and close relationship with the funerary monuments from the Bronze Era, long-abandoned and reinterpreted in a heroic key. During the summer of 479 BC, the Persians destroyed Athens; on their return, the Athenians came across a nightmarish scene. Legend has it that they took an oath on the field of the final battle, in Plataea, to not rebuild the temples in order to remember the destruction. How close their relationship sometimes was with the historic and heroic past was also demonstrated by Troy, Urbs Capta par excellence, which comprised two cities, the real and the imaginary one. Indeed, despite being febrile re-builders, even the Romans were obliged to live with monuments in ruined and moribund cities, to which they succeeded in attributing a positive function, at least in a consolatory key. Indeed, it was popularly considered futile to mourn the death of a loved one near city ruins and more appropriate to take stock of the insignificance of one's own existence and of private grief.