Rome: When Stone Puts the Empire on Trial

Before dawn the stone of Rome is already awake, with older streets beneath modern ones and earlier temples asleep under churches, and the narrator walks through the city's layers from Romulus marking a boundary in the soil to the Roman Forum, where Cicero raised his voice and stone became politics. Julius Caesar understands that rule is also spectacle, Augustus wants people to see order in marble façades and straight roads, and Vitruvius arrives carrying his book on proportion, materials and the human being himself. The Colosseum invites the architect to descend into its memory, Trajan's Column unrolls as a spiraling stone book, Hadrian leaves his villa at Tivoli, and inside the Pantheon a beam of sunlight falls through the oculus, an eye open to the universe, before the Western Empire falls and pagan stone is reused in a Christian world. The Renaissance digs for ideas, Bramante dreams of centralized geometry, Michelangelo treats architecture as gigantic sculpture, Bernini turns the city into a stage, Borromini makes walls curve and breathe, the Trevi Fountain makes water an actor, Piranesi draws a Rome that never existed, and Mussolini tries to borrow the image of empire. After Rome tells New York that she builds downward in layers of time and tells the narrator that architecture is time taking form, her rulers, architects and unknown stonecutters stand trial at midnight in the Forum, and the book ends with someone lifting a stone from the ruins and placing it somewhere new, so that the story begins again.