Vittorio Mazzucconi - Architecture

A new foundation
When one looks at that site of sad ruins which once was the Roman imperial Forum, the eye wanders till the hill which stands at the border of the Forum area that is covered with green and turned into a ruin itself, with a few surviving foundation structures of the imperial palaces.
This hill is the Palatine, a site of mystery. The eye follows the indented profile of the cypresses and of the other trees on its top, while beyond them widens the sky and, even beyond ....
Beyond lays the past and even the future of Rome: a fabulous past, when Rome was born on this hill, a past of glory when it became an Empire, and may be the future of a vision, the one which our project is proposing.
There is an intention in it of repeating the rite of the ancient foundation, thus living once again the dawning experience of the Romulus's Roma quadrata and, at the same time, of reviving the imperial palaces, which stood on this site. What a wonder these palaces were! If we look at the conditions in which they actually are, with a few members amputated and corroded, stripped of every ornament, we are moved to great sadness. The ground where they stood is now an immense green with a few emerging ruins and some huge pine trees, surrounded by an aura of great melancholy, of unutterable tragedy. The way in which such a powerful civilization, a monumental architecture, an absolute power disappeared, forces us to face the indisputable proof of the vanity of human glory.
Certainly such a splendor was not exempt of evil, of violence but, in its collapse until the nude misery of today, there is a newly conquered purity, an ancient virtue, that gives us hope and courage to start our work. To reconstruct the lost magnificence? Or re-build the imperial palaces? Or re-found Romulus's city, at least as a propitious auspicious for a new Rome, a new civilization?