LAUSR

During my time at the BSR I carried out research for what I intend to be a monograph on modern Roman urban history and its representation, contestation and reimagining on, in, and through cinema. In particular, my time at the BSR was spent digging — so to speak— deeper into the history of the Fascist-era sventramenti — disembowellings — of Rome: clearances and excavations that radically altered the shape, texture, spatiality, lived experience and meaning of Rome’s urban core. Given that so much of central Rome was cleared, dug up and, occasionally, re-edified during the ventennio, I felt it necessary to focus on the complex history that produced what is now known as the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, one of the latest and most ambiguous projects of sventramento. I have surveyed the representation of the process and aftermath of clearing this dense neighbourhood that had accreted around the Mausoleum of Augustus. My research has looked into the paintings, photographs, documentary and fiction films that directly or rather more abstractly or diffusely index this strange episode in the history of modern Rome. My investigation leads me to propose a kind of emptiness at the heart of Rome’s modernity: an emptiness that is produced in part by Fascism, but that lingers on in the urban imaginary, and in the ways in which Rome’s centre is used and experienced. This emptiness is a significant and, perhaps, specific feature of modern Rome, one with aesthetic and ideological consequences that exceed the visions of the Fascist planners who oversaw the sventramenti.