Articles by Nicoletta Giannini

Aim of this paper is to introduce the Medieval Forma Urbis project which is part of an agreement between Lazio Region and Tor Vergata University (Rome-Italy). The analysis starts from an assumption: surely, the urban history of ancient and medieval Rome has a wide bibliography with important summaries and several detailed studies related to medieval buildings, by architects and art historians but also by archaeologists. Furthermore, historical far-reaching reviews contained in the recent essay by J.C. Maire Vigueur or in the one by C.J. Wickham apply a stringent use of the archaeological record and material culture. Why then propose a cohesive and, at the same time, detailed study about what remains of medieval Rome? The first observation we can make about all this literature, is that this kind of approach rarely used methods specific to Building Archaeology and, in any case, never when they concern the entire urban area. We believe, instead, that only stratigraphy and typology methodically applied to the reading of historical buildings can allow us to read and unravel the complex palimpsest of the city. The typological and stratigraphic analysis, managed through geo-referenced databases, is then a proper solution to reading the different building phenomena in quantitative diachronic and synchronic terms.