ABSTRACT
One thou sand two hundred years after Vitruvius wrote his book on architecture, we are back in Rome. But this Rome is no longer the seat of an empire. Officially, the capital of the empire, a Chris tian empire now, has been moved by the emperor Constantine to Constantinople, the New Rome, in 330 ce. What remains of Rome and its four teen regions arranged by Au gustus in 7 bce is nothing but ruined structures and open fields. The Roman Empire and the city of Rome had been declining for at least three hundred years. Left in the city were rudimentary pieces of imperial administration and the Chris tian bishop who claimed to be the successor to Saint Peter, the ‘first bishop’, and for this reason legal owner of the Lateran prop erty of the city ceded to him by Emperor Constantine. The popu la tion of Rome at its lowest point had shrunk to a mere 30,000. Most people lived in the ancient ruins or in tenements between the ruins, some having lost the memory of who they were, some claiming that they descended from the ancient inhabitants of the city, but no longer one of what Oswald Spengler called the ‘ruling races’ (Herrenvölker). It was in this Rome, in an ironic and tragic twist of his tory, that the first polit ically conscious regionalist building was erected using regional elements to defend the rights of the inhabitants of what was left of Rome to be inde pend ent from an encroaching new global empire in the making, the pope’s new empire. The building, known today as the Casa dei Crescenzi, was a rel at ively small and strange-looking fortified mansion of weird configuration and, at first sight, bizarre decorations and arcane inscriptions covering its facades. The architectural his tor ian W. S. Heckscher tried to decipher its meaning, reconstruct its story, and explain its inscriptions. The Casa dei Crescenzi stands near the circular Temple of Hercules Victor and the Temple of Portunus, sometimes erroneously called the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, a masterpiece of Roman architecture. It was erected between 1040 and 1065, or perhaps as late as 1100. In contrast to the classical order of these temples, the Casa dei Crescenzi is a chaotic collage of fragments cannibalized from antique Roman buildings, mixed with imitations of antique sculpture, antique friezes, arcane ornaments, volutes, foliage, and cryptic inscriptions, difficult to appreciate or understand today.
