ABSTRACT
As Sigmund Freud notes in Civilization and Its Discontents, Rome’s architecture contains its past versions of itself, but repurposed. Roman epochs sediment in layers of stone. The Rome of roamers, of Sardinians and North Africans, the Rome invisible to three-day itineraries. Neighbourhoods that might as well be different cities rub up against each other in crooked, twisted juxtaposition. Rome once, of course, went much further. This city was for a millennium, the mad jumbled beating heart of the world’s greatest empire. Britain to Egypt, Austria to Palestine. Rome never en-gridded itself though. A city of labyrinths and narrow alleyways and the original ghetto, it refused to succumb to the order imprinted elsewhere. European auditoriums and theatres bear the lasting imprints of Rome’s orientation between seers and scenes. The director Romeo Castellucci calls the Italianate theatrical space, which has imprinted its spectacular structure on thousands of city’s theatres, coercive in its demand that something must appear before spectators’ hungry eyes.
