The Rhetoric of Rome and the Reappropriation of the Ancient Monuments

Every culture has to deal with decay and death. Buildings and sites lose their original function and significance to be used in a different way by later generations. This becomes explicit in the case of, for instance, the Pantheon and the Colosseum. The way these Roman monuments are interpreted leans heavily on the ideas of the interpreter. Everyone reconstructs Rome according his own selective memory and creates a very personal image that may not necessarily take heed of any historical evidence. Even construction in the late nineteenth-century Rome follows its own distorted path as does Mussolini who transformed the Urbs according to his own ideological and political twist. All these volatile appropriations of the past should remind us that it is our task to preserve Rome as a cultural memory that reflects our whole civilization in an enlightened modern way.