Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Fri Jul 09 2010 at 19:36:51
In the 17th century, there were large deserted districts of Rome, built in the time of the Cæsars and still more or less standing; they were largely situated on the outskirts of the city. In those days, you see, Rome was a shadow of its imperial self, a million strong; population crashed beginning in the 2nd century A.D, and had been recovering very slowly: people had been steadily scavenging the old quarters for material with which to build new houses, but there is only so much stone any one house needs, and people mostly took chunks of the Colosseum anyway; the stones are bigger and normally much better than those gotten from the remains of ancient domi, let alone the brick piles of the Aventinerookeries of old. Of course, the insulæ sometimes fell apart even while inhabited, but there were more ruins left of old Rome even in the 18th century than we, perhaps, might think.