ABSTRACT
The image of Rome is so often a vision of ruins, crumbling romantically or standing proud against a Mediterranean sky. The ruins of antiquity, whether the rustic tufo of Republican walls and temples or the red brick and white marble of the imperial buildings, attract most attention from modern visitors. Like modern tourists, medieval visitors to the city admired Rome’s antiquities and explored the ruins. Very recent archaeological research has cast light on the history of these monuments in the Middle Ages, which allows us to better reconstruct the cityscape of Rome in the seventh, eighth or ninth centuries. In the Middle Ages, the material remains of antiquity were indices for medieval attitudes and ambitions for their present. On the one hand, the roads, walls, aqueducts and buildings of ancient Rome provided a frame and a model for monumental urbanistic expression in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the legacy of Rome’s Christian past lent the medieval city and its builders ultimate prestige in the crafting of the city around the cult of saints. Close attention to the material culture of early medieval Rome brings into focus the significance of ancient artefacts in the building of the medieval city and the medieval idea of the city itself. What follows is an attempt to point out two different yet related roles of ancient archaeology in medieval Rome: as models of architectural canons and the politics of architecture and as potent pathways to the sacred past. These two roles of archaeology in the medieval city diverge from the conventionally understood significance of ancient materials in the Middle Ages, as revival or Classicism, and in better understanding the uses of the past in the medieval Rome we can better understand the sophisticated constructions of authority and power which focused on it.
