Mapping the Eternal City: Rodolfo Lanciani’s <i>Forma Urbis Romae</i>

Abstract Rodolfo Lanciani’s multi-layered map of Rome, the Forma Urbis Romae (1893‒1901), is acknowledged as a masterpiece of late nineteenth-century cartography and remains much utilized by classical researchers. Its title references the third-century Forma Urbis, the Severan marble map of the city, and this paper situates Lanciani’s map within a cartographical tradition that was part of the modern reception of the Severan marbles. It investigates how the fragments were emblematically incorporated into Lanciani’s own mapping project and how they were thus ideologically framed by his discourse about the political and social change that was taking place in post-unification Rome. Employing the methodology of social critical cartography, this paper highlights the persuasive aspect of Lanciani’s cartographic narrative in which the eternal city, materialized in the Severan marble map now embedded in Lanciani’s own Forma Urbis Romae, is presented as fulfilling its eternal destiny as the capital of the modern united Italy.