Prof: Welcome to Roman
Architecture.
I'm Professor Kleiner,
and what I'd like to do today
is to give you a sense of some
of the great buildings and some
of the themes that we will be
studying together this semester.
I think it's important to note,
from the outset,
that Roman architecture is
primarily an architecture of
cities.
 
The Romans structured a
man-made, worldwide empire out
of architectural forms,
and those architectural forms
revolutionized the ancient world
and exerted a lasting influence
on the architecture and the
architects of post-classical
times.
 
This semester we will be
concerned primarily with urban
communities--
with urban communities--and we
will,
in the first half of this
semester,
we will focus on the city of
Rome, and in the second--
and also central Italy,
including Pompeii.
 
And I wanted to show you,
at the outset,
an aerial view of Rome--you see
it over here,
on the left-hand side of the
screen--
that situates us in the very
core of the ancient city.
You see the famous Colosseum,
the very icon of Rome,
at the upper right.
 
You see the Roman Forum,
as it looks today,
and you see a part of the
Capitoline Hill,
transformed by Michelangelo
into the famous Campidoglio,
as well as the Via dei Fori
Imperiali of Mussolini,
built by Mussolini,
and the Imperial Fora.
So the city of Rome again we'll
be concentrating on,
at the beginning of this
semester, as well as the city of
Pompeii.
 
An aerial view of Pompeii,
as it looks today.
You can see many of the
buildings of the city,
including the houses and the
shops, and also the
entertainment district.
 
This is the theater and the
music hall of ancient Pompeii.
The amphitheater is over here.
 
And you can see,
of course, looming up in the
background, Mount Vesuvius,
the mountain that caused all
that trouble in 79 A.D.
 
So that's the first half of the
semester.
The second half of the semester
we are going to be going out
into the provinces,
into the Roman provinces,
and that is going to take us--
and we're going to look at the
provinces both in the eastern
and the western part of the
Empire--
and that will take us to Roman
Greece.
 
It will take us to Asia Minor;
Asia Minor, which of course is
modern Turkey.
 
It will take us to North Africa.
 
It will take us to the Middle
East,
in what's now Jordan and Syria,
and it will also take us to
Europe,
to western Europe,
to cities in France and to
cities in Spain.
And let me just show you an
example of some of the buildings
that we'll look at as we travel
to the provinces.
This is the Library of Celsus,
in Ephesus, on the western
coast of Turkey.
 
This--the theater,
a spectacularly well-preserved
theater at Sabratha,
you see on the upper right-hand
side;
and down here a restored view
of the masterful Palace of
Diocletian.
We have the late Roman emperors
in a place called Split,
which is in Croatia,
along the fabulously gorgeous
Dalmatian Coast today.
 
So those are just a sampling of
the kinds of buildings that
we'll look at in the provinces.
 
We're going to be seeing,
we'll be concentrating on the
ways in which the Romans planned
and built their cities.
And it's important to note,
from the very outset,
that Rome itself grew in a very
ad hoc way.
And we can tell that.
 
Here's a Google Earth image
showing that core of Rome,
with the Colosseum,
with the famous,
modern Victor Emmanuel Monument
that looks either like a wedding
cake or a typewriter.
 
It's very white,
and it's called the wedding
cake by a lot of the locals.
 
You see that here.
 
But it's a landmark in Rome.
 
And the Capitoline Hill,
with the Campidoglio over here;
the Forum, the Roman Forum;
the Imperial Fora on this side.
But you can see from the
relatively crooked and narrow
streets of the city of Rome,
as they look from above today,
you can see that again the city
grew in a fairly ad hoc
way,
as I mentioned.
It wasn't planned all at once,
it just grew up over time,
beginning in the eighth century
B.C.
Now this is interesting because
what we know about the Romans is
when they were left to their own
devices,
and they could build a city
from scratch,
they didn't let it grow in an
ad hoc way.
They structured it in a very
methodical way.
It was basically based on
military strategy,
military planning.
 
The Romans, they couldn't have
conquered the world without
obviously having a masterful
military enterprise,
and everywhere they went on
their various campaigns,
their various military
campaigns, they would build
camps,
and those camps were always
laid out in a very geometric
plan,
along a grid,
usually square or rectangular.
So when we begin to see the
Romans building their ideal
Roman city,
they turn to that so-called
castrum,
or military camp design,
and they build their cities
that way.
And I show you here one example.
 
We're using Google Earth here
again,
another example of,
or an example of a city called
Timgad,
T-i-m-g-a-d,
which is in modern Algeria,
and the ancient city still
survives.
 
And if we look at this Google
Earth image of it,
you can see there are no later
accretions,
as we have in Rome,
no later civilizations built on
top of it.
 
You can see the ideal Roman
plan, which, as I said,
is usually either a square or a
rectangle.
It has in the center the two
main streets of the city.
The north-south street is
called the cardo,
c-a-r-d-o.
 
The east-west street is called
the decumanus,
d-e-c-u-m-a-n-u-s.
 
We'll go back to all of this in
the future; so you don't have to
worry about it today.
 
The cardo and the
decumanus,
and you can see that they cross
exactly;
they intersect exactly at the
center of the city.
And then the rest of the city
is arranged in blocks,
very regular blocks,
this grid plan that I mentioned
before.
 
Then some of the major
monuments, whether it's the
theater or the forum,
are arranged in different parts
of the city,
and then these blocks
constitute essentially the
housing and the shops and so on
and so forth.
 
This is a city that was planned
in around 100 A.D.,
under the emperor Trajan.
 
And again it gives us an
inkling of what the Romans --
when the Romans thought about
ideal Roman town planning --
it was this grid plan,
not Rome, but this grid plan
that they had very much in mind.
 
Cities like Rome,
like Timgad,
and most of the others that
we'll look at in the course of
this semester,
were surrounded by defensive
walls.
 
As a major military machine in
its own right,
Rome was only too aware of the
dangers of attack from others,
and consequently they walled
their cities.
And we will look at the two
major walls in Rome,
as well as walls in other parts
of the Roman world.
I promise not to spend too much
time on walls,
because they're essentially
piles of stone.
But they're important in their
own right and I will speak to
them on occasion,
and especially the two in Rome.
You see them here.
 
This is the first wall in Rome,
the so-called Servian Walls,
which was built in the
Republic, in the Roman Republic,
to surround the city,
the Republican city,
and essentially the Seven
Hills, the famous Seven Hills of
Rome,
to surround the Seven Hills of
Rome,
in the fourth century B.C.
You see a section of it here.
 
This wall--any of you who've
come to Rome by train,
and the Stazione Termini,
see a very extensive section of
the Servian Walls,
as you get out--I don't know if
you've noticed it,
but you should see--an
extensive section of the Servian
Walls right outside the train
station.
 
This is a different section,
a picture I took on the
Aventine Hill,
showing part of that wall.
And that was eventually
replaced by later walls.
The city grew over time.
 
It needed a more extensive,
broader wall system,
and in the late third century
A.D., under the emperor
Aurelian, the famous Aurelian
Walls were built.
The Aurelian Walls,
as you know -- there's no way
you've missed those --
I'm sure if you've been in Rome
you've seen the Aurelian Walls--
they're there,
they're very much there--
at least if you've left the
city.
 
Maybe if you've just gone into
the core of the city and haven't
gone beyond that,
you might not have seen them.
But if you've left the city,
you've seen the Aurelian Walls
-- a very impressive set of
walls that encircled the later
city.
 
One thing that's apparent to
you as you look at these,
even if you have no knowledge
whatsoever of Roman
architecture,
is these are made of very
different kinds of materials.
 
So technical issues come to the
fore right away as one analyzes
this sort of thing.
 
In the early period,
essentially blocks of stone,
piled one on top of the other,
for the wall.
Here, a more sophisticated use,
later on in the Empire,
of a new technology that we're
going to talk about a lot this
semester.
 
That is concrete,
and what concrete did to
revolutionize Roman
architecture;
concrete, in this particular
case, faced with brick.
We talked about regular town
planning and the location of the
cardo and the
decumanus.
I want to show you just an
example of this.
This is a city in Italy,
in this case the city of
Pompeii.
 
You see it here in plan.
 
This is a plan of Pompeii as it
looked, just at the moment that
Vesuvius erupted.
 
So in August of 79 A.D.
 
this was the way Pompeii was at
that particular time.
You can see it's not really a
rectangle;
it's kind of elongated,
sort of like an oval,
kind of an oval,
an irregular oval.
But it has the sense;
I think it has the sense.
It shows you that again even
though the Romans were thinking
to try to create their cities in
a very regular way,
it didn't always work out
exactly that way,
depending on the terrain and so
on and so forth.
But this is a rough--it's sort
of an irregular rectangle,
as you can see here.
 
But if you look very carefully,
you sort of say to yourself
like, "Where's the
cardo,
where's the dec?
 
You just told us the
cardo and the
decumanus intersect in
the center;
like where are they?
 
Why aren't they intersecting in
the center?"
Well, surprise,
surprise, maybe not such a
surprise, if you look over here
at the bottom left,
you will actually see the
original city of Pompeii.
In the fourth century B.C.,
the third century B.C.,
the second century B.C.,
Pompeii didn't look like this;
Pompeii looked like this.
 
And if you look very carefully
at just this section,
where we have the buildings in
the various colors,
you will see that there is
indeed a cardo and a
decumanus that intersect
exactly at the center of this
roughly square--
so this was actually pretty
regular originally--
this roughly square city of
Pompeii.
 
At three we find the forum,
because the forum is always at
the intersection.
 
The Romans try--they're very
careful about this sort of
thing--
try to put their forum right at
the intersection of the
cardo and the
decumanus.
 
You see that here;
and then you see a lot of other
buildings splayed off to either
side.
The law court or the basilica,
another temple here.
Here the main Temple of
Jupiter, and the Senate House or
Curia, and a series of other
religious and comparable
structures, on the right-hand
side.
So it began as a quite regular
plan, cardo and
decumanus intersecting at
the center, forum right at the
intersection of those two.
 
And then over time it grew.
 
It grew and expanded,
and the streets,
the same streets,
the cardo expanded,
although it was no longer
exactly at the center of the
city.
 
This is a view from Google
Earth that shows you just pretty
much--
I tried to angle it in such a
way that it looks--
that it's exactly the same
angle, or close to exactly the
same angle,
as the plan that we just looked
at before.
And you can see over here the
amphitheater.
You can see many of the
streets, including the shops and
the houses, and you can see over
here the forum,
as it looks today from the air.
 
And again it shows you how
helpful Google--
and, of course,
as you know,
using Google Earth yourselves
for other purposes,
you know that you can go way
down;
I mean, you can find the entire
city and then you can go and
explore each individual building
on your own and in your own
time.
 
In fact, that's what I've done
here.
Here you see a closer view of
the forum in Pompeii,
as it looks today,
from the air,
via Google Earth,
here at the left.
And I compare it to this plan
that comes from your textbook,
one of your two textbooks.
 
This is the book by
J.B. Ward-Perkins,
which is, of the two,
the more--well,
they're both important,
but then they both do different
things--
but one of the two important
books that we'll be using this
semester.
Here is a plan from that book.
 
And you can see the way in
which this forum,
and this forum is very
important at Pompeii because
it's very early in date,
and consequently we will talk
about it a fair amount.
 
We see this.
 
The way Roman forums were
usually arranged was to have one
general open rectangular space,
open to the sky,
surrounded by columns,
with a temple,
the key, the most important
temple,
the chief temple,
pushed up against one of the
short back walls,
and dominating the space in
front of it.
 
This is a Capitolium;
we'll talk about what a
Capitolium is in a future
lecture, but it is a temple to
Jupiter and others,
as we shall see.
Temple of Apollo over here,
the basilica or law courts over
here.
 
And you can see,
interestingly enough,
they have essentially the same
shape as the central forum
proper,
rectangular with a colonnade in
the center,
and then something on one side;
it's not another temple but
rather a tribunal,
a place from which the judge
would try the cases in the law
courts.
 
We see the Senate House over
here, and a series of other
buildings, including a
marketplace and some other
buildings here,
on the right-hand side.
So a typical Roman forum at its
earliest.
This dates very early on,
second century B.C.,
and is therefore an extremely
important building for us.
Just so that you get a sense of
what some of these look like in
actuality,
this is the basilica or the law
court,
which is part of the Forum of
Pompeii.
 
And we see that tribunal that I
mentioned before,
a two-story tribunal from which
the judge would try the cases.
The building isn't as well
preserved as we'd like,
although there's quite a bit
there.
What is there allows us to
create this kind of
reconstruction drawing where we
can get a very good sense of
what this building actually
looked like in antiquity.
You see the tribunal over there.
 
You see that there are double
stories with columns on either
side.
 
You see these colossal columns
along the aisle.
But most importantly,
unlike the forum,
which was open to the sky,
this is roofed,
and it had a flat roof with
what's called a coffered
ceiling--
we'll talk about that later in
the term--
but then a sloping roof from
the outside.
 
And basilicas were always
roofed;
that's what distinguishes them
from a lot of other Roman
buildings.
 
Roman temple architecture.
 
The Temples of Jupiter and
Apollo at Pompeii are not that
well preserved,
but some Roman temples are
magnificently preserved.
 
I mean, look at this one,
it's pristine;
it's like it was created
yesterday as a duplicate of what
a Roman temple,
or a restoration of what a
Roman temple might have looked
like.
You could put this in Memphis
or somewhere like that,
and think that you had a nice
replica of a Roman temple.
That's how well preserved it is.
 
It's an amazing temple.
 
It just happens to be well
preserved, in part because it
was re-used over time,
most recently as a small
archaeological museum.
 
This is the famous Maison
Carrée,
or Square House,
for obvious reasons,
that is in the beautiful French
town of Nîmes,
in the south of France.
 
You see it here in all its
glory.
And think as you look at this
how many banks were based on
this plan.
 
I mean, you can go to almost
any small city in America and
see a bank that looks something
like this,
which just gives you some sense
of again how influential Roman
architecture has been over time.
 
It's a quite traditional temple.
 
We'll talk about the difference
between traditional temple
architecture and more innovative
temple architecture in the
course of this semester.
 
And as innovative as it gets,
is one of the key buildings of
Roman architecture,
which is, of course,
the famous Pantheon in Rome.
 
I'm sure there's none of you
who's been in Rome who hasn't
been inside the Pantheon.
 
It's an incredible building.
 
This is a Google Map.
 
It was done during--the
building was put up during the
reign of the very important,
from the architectural
standpoint and many other
standpoints,
the very important Emperor
Hadrian.
And we see--this is again one
of the wonderful things about
Google Earth,
because you're seeing here the
modern city, but you're also
seeing in 3D.
The building still stands,
and it's in incredible
condition--
but you're also seeing the
building almost as it would've
been in ancient times,
surrounded by its modern
environment.
It's a temple.
 
It's a very distinctive and
innovative temple,
because when you look at it
from the front,
you see it has a kind of
traditional porch.
It is not unlike the one on the
Maison Carrée with
columns that support a pediment
and looks like earlier Greek or
Etruscan architecture.
 
But what's very innovative
about it is that once you go
into the building,
you see that this is not
about--this is all about an
interior space,
an extraordinary interior space
that is shaped by light,
that is shaped by genius,
essentially.
And this image is actually one
of those that gives you a sense
of the kind of thing that I've
been able to incorporate into
this course,
that I didn't always use
before, which includes many,
many, many of my own images.
And this one I'm particularly
proud of.
It's a very atmospheric view of
the dome of the Pantheon,
and I think really gives you,
almost more than anything else,
gives you a sense almost more
than anything else that I can
show you today,
of Rome at its best,
of the power and glory of Rome
and of Roman architecture.
I'm very biased,
but as far as I'm concerned
this is the greatest building
ever conceived by man.
So there you are.
 
We'll see by the end of the
semester whether you agree with
me or you think I'm absolutely
wrong about that.
This is another extraordinary
structure and one that enables
me to say something that you'll
hear me say more than once--
and I know I'm biased--but say
more than once in the course of
this semester,
and that is that there isn't
much that the Romans didn't
discover,
didn't create,
and not just in architecture,
in all kinds of ways.
 
And this is a good example of
that.
This is the so-called,
the famous Markets of Trajan in
Rome, part of the great Forum of
the emperor Trajan in Rome.
And you can see that what the
Romans have done is taken a
hill,
one of the famous Seven Hills,
the Quirinal Hill,
taken that hill,
cut it back,
poured concrete on it and
created this incredible shopping
center on the side of the hill.
If this isn't the beginning of
mall architecture,
I don't know what is;
shopping mall architecture.
It's right here already.
 
You can shop;
there are over 150 shops.
You can shop on a variety of
levels.
You can shop in the hemicycle,
you can shop along the Via
Biberatica.
 
You can shop 'til you drop in
this incredible mall.
And as one looks at it in
detail, one sees amazing things.
This is a view of one of the
shopping streets.
You can see the typical
polygonal masonry that is so
characteristic of Roman street
design here.
Along it, some of the
individual shops--think that
away at the top,
that was added later.
But you see some of the
individual shops here.
And look how ingenious the
Romans have been to provide not
only a ramp but also a series of
stairs, flat area stairs and so
on.
 
And this has all been very,
very carefully orchestrated by
the designers in a way that is
not only utilitarian but also
very attractive.
 
And then there's this.
 
This is the Great Hall of the
Markets of Trajan in Rome,
a kind of bazaar,
which also has a series of
shops and also attic windows,
as you can see, above.
But then the particular marvel
of this space is--look what
they've done above.
 
They have taken,
using concrete once again--and
this gives you some sense of the
miracle of Roman concrete.
Using concrete,
they have created a new kind of
vault,
which we call the groin
vault,
which is a ribbed vault,
and you can see the ribs very
clearly here.
And they have lifted that
ribbed vault on top of piers
that have been attenuated,
narrowed to the point,
in a very sophisticated way,
much more than was true up to
this moment.
 
So they have been able to lift
those groin vaults in a way that
always reminds me--
it's as if you went and opened
a series of umbrellas over a
space,
lifted the space up in a truly
miraculous way.
And as an example again of the
fact that the Romans--there's
nothing the Romans didn't do or
didn't invent.
Here you see the well-known
marketplace in San Francisco,
where you see essentially the
same idea;
a series of shops down below
and then this magnificently
lifted ceiling above.
 
So Roman architecture,
as I said in the very
beginning, really had a huge
impact on later architecture.
The Markets of Trajan were part
of the forum complex,
the Forum of Trajan,
which you see part of here.
The forum itself was really
quite conventional.
This is an interesting building
because we have a fairly
traditional approach to the
forum itself,
and then an innovative approach
to the markets.
This is a restored view of the
basilica or law court of the
Forum of Trajan.
 
You see that it's very
traditional, with columns and
marble and a flat ceiling with
coffers.
And that's what most of the
forum looks like.
The markets are done in a very
different style,
as we saw.
 
And this particular forum was
not only a meeting and a
marketplace,
or a place where cases could be
tried,
but was also a monument in
stone to the military victories
of Trajan.
Trajan was the emperor who
extended the borders of the
empire to their furthest
reaches,
and the monument is a testament
to what his accomplishments were
militarily.
 
And the famous Column of
Trajan, which still stands and
is in magnificent condition,
as you can see here,
is a monument that is wrapped
with a spiral frieze that
purports to describe,
from bottom to top,
all of the exploits,
all of the military exploits of
Trajan's two military campaigns
in Dacia.
It also served as the emperor's
tomb.
There was a burial chamber down
below for urns of Trajan and his
wife Plotina.
 
So it served not only as a
commemoration of his military
victory over Dacia--
which by the way is modern
Romania today--
but also to victory over death
for the emperor.
 
Every Roman city had its bath
buildings.
Most of the houses did not have
running water,
so baths were extremely
important, obviously.
So most of these had more than
one, and in fact most cities,
Pompeii, for example,
seems to have had about three
bath buildings.
 
They're very important,
both in terms of their social,
their practical needs,
and also as a place for social
interaction,
but also because there are some
very interesting architectural
experiments that took place in
them.
 
I'm going to show you in the
course of this semester the
development from the simplest
bath buildings,
such as the ones in Pompeii,
to the most elaborate.
Those of you who've visited the
Baths of Caracalla in Rome --
that's an example of one of the
huge and most elaborate bath
buildings.
 
I show you here on the
left-hand side of the screen,
just as an example,
a view of one of the rooms of
the Forum Baths in Pompeii,
the caldarium or warm
room.
 
All of these baths had multiple
spaces within them.
One of the distinctions of the
earlier baths was that the men's
sections and the women's
sections were separate from one
another.
 
And I hate to say it,
but the men had all the great
rooms.
 
They were bigger and they were
more ornately decorated,
as this one is -- the warm room
of the men's baths at Pompeii.
But you can see here,
even in much smaller scale than
a building like the Pantheon,
and much earlier than the
Pantheon,
they're beginning to explore
the curvatures of the wall,
the semi-dome there,
and the way in which you can
create light effects by putting
holes or what's called an
oculus,
a round hole,
in part of the ceiling,
and other rectangular holes in
the ceiling to create fantastic
light effects.
 
So they're already exploring
that here in Pompeii.
When we look at some of the
larger bathing establishments,
the Baths of Caracalla still
look--well they're essentially a
pile of concrete faced with
brick today,
as any of you who've seen it
know.
But the scale is truly
colossal, and one is very
impressed when one wanders
around the Baths of Caracalla.
But some of the others,
for example,
the Baths of Diocletian have
been reused in modern times,
and it's one of the reasons
that so many Roman buildings
survive is because of this kind
of reuse over the centuries.
This, the Baths of Diocletian,
part of which was transformed
into a church,
at first, was decorated at one
point in part by Michelangelo.
 
And what we're looking at here,
the Church of Santa Maria degli
Angeli,
Saint Mary of the Angels,
what we're looking at here is a
view into what was the cold
room,
or the frigidarium of
the Baths of Diocletian,
but transformed into a church,
used as nave of the church of
Saint Mary of the Angels.
But if you look very closely,
you'll see those same cross or
groin vaults that we saw in the
Markets of Trajan,
that are also used here to lift
the ceiling in a very effective
way,
and then all these
multi-colored columns that you
see are actually the columns
from the ancient building.
 
So even in this interior of
Santa Maria degli Angeli,
we can get a sense of how
ornate some of the decorations
of some of these bath buildings
were.
We're going to look at Roman
theaters this semester.
This is an example of one,
the spectacular Roman theater
at Orange in the south of
France.
You see it here.
 
I'm not going to go into the
parts of a theater or its
relationship to earlier Greek
theatrical architecture.
But you can see the stair,
you can see the seats,
you can see the orchestra.
 
You can see the stage building,
a stage building that initially
was decorated with a forest of
columns,
only a couple of which survive,
as well as a lot of sculptural
decoration,
again most of which does not
survive.
 
But one of the points I want to
make today is that the Greeks
tended to build--the Greeks
always built their theaters on
hillsides.
 
They used the natural hill to
support the seats.
And that's true at Orange as
well.
But the Romans were not content
to build their theaters only on
hillsides.
 
They wanted to build their
theaters where they wanted to
build their theaters,
and if they wanted to build a
theater in downtown Rome,
they wanted to build a theater
in downtown Rome.
 
So what they did was that they
used concrete again to build a
hill, upon which they could
support those same seats.
And that's again an innovation
that we'll talk about.
This is the Theater of
Marcellus in Rome,
the earliest surviving stone
theater in Rome that dates to
the Age of Augustus.
 
But I show it to you again,
just to show you the wonders of
Google Earth.
 
I've looked at this building a
zillion times.
I've wandered around it.
 
Most of the ancient part is
over on this side,
and I'll show that to you in
another lecture.
But over time this is one of
those buildings that was
transformed into all sorts of
things, most recently into a
fabulous condominium.
 
But as you wander around it
today, you get a sense of some
of the high-rise apartments that
have been added to the original
theater.
 
But you can't get a full sense
of it unless you go up above it.
And so here's where again
Google Earth is so helpful,
because we can look down on the
entire complex,
see the gardens,
see some of the apartments,
see the circular driveway and
so on and so forth,
which gives us information that
it wouldn't be possible to glean
anywhere else.
 
And here is--if you let that
transformation from modern Rome
to ancient Rome take place on
Google Earth,
this is what you're going to
get for that same Theater of
Marcellus.
 
We just saw it and what it
looks like today on Google
Earth.
 
Here's what it looks like when
you let it transform completely
into the Theater of Marcellus
from ancient times.
The Colosseum,
the very icon of Rome.
No Roman city was without its
amphitheater,
its place for gladiatorial and
animal combat,
and Rome was no exception.
 
The most famous surviving Roman
amphitheater is the Colosseum.
I show it to you here from the
inside,
rather than the outside
initially, because I can--
it allows me to illustrate the
places where the animals were
kept down below,
but also to show you that that
building has been used as a
quarry.
It was used by the popes and
the princes of later Italy as a
stone quarry.
 
They would take
essentially--well they stripped
it of all its interior marble,
to use that in a variety of
buildings in Rome,
and some of those we know their
identification even today.
 
Here's a view of one of the
corridors where you can see once
again those groin vaults or
ribbed vaults that the Romans
popularized.
 
Connecting all these cities
with one another were the
streets of the city.
 
We'll look at streets,
especially in Pompeii,
where they are extremely well
preserved,
and these streets look very
modern--
you see the polygonal
stones--but very modern in the
use of the sidewalks.
 
The sidewalks;
there are drains as well along
the sidewalks.
 
And then you can see these very
deep rut marks where the wheels
of the carts used to--over time
obviously they made these ruts
in the pavement.
 
And then over here a small
fountain, a fountain blessed by
Hermes or Mercury.
 
You can see him there with his
wings and his caduceus.
A small fountain,
important obviously again
because most of the houses did
not have running water,
and there had to be a place
that you could go to collect
water for household use.
 
One of the great things about
Pompeii, of course,
is it gives us a sense of what
life was like in ancient Roman
times, daily life was like.
 
And we'll look at millstones
that are part of bakeries,
as well as ovens that
look--again, the Romans invented
everything--
look very much like a modern
pizza oven.
 
You go over to BAR,
you'll see one of those.
Over here, wine shops;
we have lots of wine shops in
these Roman cities,
and they're particularly well
preserved in Herculaneum and in
Pompeii,
with these clay amphorae
that were used to hold wines,
that were brought to Italy,
and also sometimes oils,
that were brought to Italy from
different parts of the world.
Every Roman city had its
McDonald's, or its Wendy's,
or its Burger King,
and I show one of those to you
here.
 
It's called a
thermopolium,
as you can see down below;
thermopolium.
A thermopolium was
essentially--what it was made up
of is a--it is a series of--a
counter, with a series of
recesses.
 
And each day those who ran this
thermopolium put
different food in there,
and so when you got
hungry--again,
the whole sort of fast food
idea--
you just walk by,
like in a cafeteria,
point out what you wanted.
They'd serve it to you and
you'd be on your way.
So very much fast food--so we
see lots of them in Pompeii and
Herculaneum.
 
We'll look at Roman houses.
 
This is one example,
the House of the Vettii in
Pompeii,
spectacularly preserved house,
where we can see a pool that
was actually used for collecting
water,
a hole in the ceiling,
but a view from the atrium of
the house into the garden.
The garden over here,
you get a sense of it -- the
greenery, the marble furniture,
the fountains,
and then the paintings on the
walls.
I mentioned at the beginning
we'll spend a fair amount of
time -- we'll spend a few
lectures on Roman painting.
And the reason that I do that
is because it's absolutely
gorgeous and it's fascinating.
 
But it also allows us to get a
better understanding of interior
decoration among the Romans,
how they decorated their walls.
But also, because as you can
see from this one example,
from Boscoreale,
now in the Metropolitan Museum,
the famous Met
Cubiculum,
which is decorated with Second
Style Roman wall painting,
that these paintings often
depict buildings.
They are architectural
paintings, and they are very
important in that regard because
we see --
we often see -- experimentation
in painting before we see it in
architecture.
 
And so there are going to be
some things,
for example,
this broken triangular
pediment,
that we're going to see first
in painting and then in built
architecture.
So painting -- extremely
important for us.
We'll also go to the city of
Ostia,
the port of Rome,
which is a city very different
from Pompeii because it is
essentially a second-century
Roman city,
rather than a first-century
Roman city.
 
The construction technique is
concrete, faced with brick.
I show you one example of that.
 
But what's most interesting
about the houses in Ostia has to
do with the kind of city it was
-- again, the port of Rome,
a commercial city.
 
It was very congested.
 
People were not as wealthy as
those in the resort town of
Pompeii,
and consequently they
needed--people didn't have
single-story houses,
like the one in Pompeii that I
just showed you before --
but rather apartment houses
with multi-stories;
a kind of condominium idea.
 
And these are fascinating in
their difference from those in
Pompeii, and that's a difference
that we will surely explore.
The very well-to-do lived
in--the very well-to-do had
villas.
 
The emperors had villas all
along what is now the Amalfi
Coast.
 
Capri, the island of Capri.
 
The emperor Augustus and
Tiberius had twelve villas on
the Island of Capri.
 
The most extraordinary villa,
Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli,
which I show you here from the
air.
A kind of microcosm of the
empire at that particular time,
with extraordinary buildings,
with pools,
decorated with sculpture that
show the eclectic taste of the
emperor who liked things Roman,
liked things Greek,
liked things Egyptian,
and statues of--he was married,
but he also had a beloved young
boy whom he met in Bithynia.
Antinous, the famous Antinous
that he met in Bithynia and who
became the love of his life.
 
And when Antinous died he
created all kinds of shrines for
Antinous.
 
This is very important
architecturally because all
these are interesting shrines.
 
But in each of those shrines he
created statues of Antinous,
and this is one showing
Antinous as an Egyptian pharaoh,
which was perfect for this
particular locale because it was
meant to conjure up a canal in
Egypt.
We're going to look at tomb
architecture--
I want to show you this very
quickly--
but we're going to look at a
lot of tomb architecture,
because tomb architecture is
particularly interesting,
because the only practical
consideration for a tomb,
is that it had to house the
remains of the deceased,
that's it.
 
So you could be very whimsical
and personal about the kind of
tomb you wanted to be buried in.
 
This is a series at Pompeii,
but we're going to look at
those of the emperor Augustus
who was buried in a mausoleum
that went back to those of the
earlier Etruscans,
kings, who ruled Rome before
the emperors did,
and he built a round tomb with
an earthen mound,
very similar to that of the
Etruscans.
Hadrian, the famous emperor
Hadrian,
was also buried in a round
tomb, at the well-known Castel
Sant' Angelo,
in Rome today,
with its beautiful Bernini
bridge,
the angels, Bernini's angels on
the bridge --
also a round tomb.
 
In its current form,
transformed into a fortress,
it was used by the popes when
they needed to hide out during
times of trouble.
 
Very whimsical tombs,
including this pyramid of a man
by the name of Cestius,
and he built this tomb during a
time of--
when a wave of things Egyptian
came into Rome,
at the time that Augustus
defeated Cleopatra and Antony.
 
And then even these communal
tombs, communal burial places
for the less well-to-do,
where their remains were placed
in urns.
 
We'll also look at tombs in
other parts of the Roman world.
This is a famous tomb,
a rock-cut tomb in Petra,
in what is now Jordan.
 
And you can see that the tomb
is essentially the rock;
in fact, the burial chamber is
inside the rock and the
façade has been carved
out of the rock.
We're going to talk about
aqueducts in the course of the
semester;
just fleetingly show you two,
the ways in which the Romans
brought--
for those they conquered,
they provided amenities,
including water,
that was brought from a great
distance.
 
This is the famous Pont du Gard
at Nîmes.
And this is the one I showed
you before on Google Earth,
the fabulous aqueduct at
Segovia that marches its way
through the city.
 
I have just a couple of
minutes, and I basically wanted
to close just making two very
quick points about the
difference between traditional
Roman architecture and
innovative Roman architecture.
 
I'm not going to go into that
in any detail here.
It's going to be the topic of
one of our lectures very soon.
But this transformation from
temples that are based on Greek
and Etruscan prototypes,
like that one here,
to something like the Pantheon.
 
I also want to mention from the
start that unlike other courses
in architecture where you may
have been studying Frank Lloyd
Wright or Borromini,
Francesco Borromini,
or Frank Gehry,
we have very few names of
architects preserved from Roman
times,
because it was the patron who
was all,
not the architect,
and I'll explain that in a
future lecture.
 
But we have some,
and we'll talk about them when
we do.
 
We will also see--and I just
want to end up where I began,
which is to say again that
Roman architecture had a huge
impact on architecture of
post-classical times.
The Roman basilica became the
Christian church.
The round tomb of Rome became
the round church in the early
Medieval and Byzantine periods.
 
Tombs like the one in Jordan,
that I showed you just before,
which form what I call kind of
a baroque phase of Roman
architecture,
were the models for
seventeenth-century Baroque
architecture in Rome,
for example,
Borromini's San Carlino.
The Pantheon had--you all know
what this is,
UVA.
 
The Pantheon had a huge impact.
 
There are many 'Pantheons'
everywhere, including in this
country banks and the like.
 
Thomas Jefferson looked to the
Pantheon to design his rotunda
at the University of Virginia,
and the lawn that lay beyond.
But for us, in this classroom,
at this particular time,
the most important impact,
as far as I'm concerned,
of Roman architecture on more
modern architecture has to do
with the amphitheater at
Pompeii,
which you see here;
my favorite amphitheater.
The Colosseum is more famous.
 
The amphitheater at Pompeii is
earlier in date.
And what's significant for us,
in this classroom,
at this particular time,
is that the amphitheater at
Pompeii--
and I kid you not--is the model
for our own amphitheater,
and that is the Yale Bowl -- it
is the model.
 
This is the building--and you
see it here from the air,
the amphitheater in Pompeii--on
which the Yale Bowl was based.
So again, the Romans have
clearly had a huge impact on
architecture worldwide;
on our own architecture.
And we think we live on a
Gothic campus,
but I'll show you,
in the course of this semester,
how many Roman buildings there
are.
In fact, we had a post--and
just to get you inspired--
we had a post in an earlier
year in which people went around
the campus to take pictures and
then post them online of
buildings that they thought were
influenced by those of the Roman
past.
 
At any rate,
that's it for today.
Great to see you, meet you all.
 
If any of you have any
questions at all,
I'm happy to answer them,
as are the teaching fellows.
