Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

[Pages:1]Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

WELCOME TO THE COURSE

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the city of Rome. This beautiful city behind me has been inhabited by humans for three millennia. And on this course, we're going to be looking at Rome at its pomp, at its height about 2000 years ago when the emperors here ruled a vast swathe of territory from Hadrian's Wall to the Nile Delta. And the resources, the materials, the ideas from around that empire allowed its rulers to the transform it from a city of brick into a city of marble. You might well think of Rome as a city of monuments the: Colosseum, the Fora, the arches, the columns, these grand statements of power and wealth. And, of course, we're going to be looking at those. But while we're doing that, we should remember that this city was also a place where up to a million people lived and died, work, ate, drank, and slept. So, we're going to be looking at it as a working city, a living city, trying to tease out the evidence for those non-grand monuments the aqueducts, the sewers, the street fountains, the apartment blocks, the warehouses, all the stuff that sustained the life in the city, that made possible that lovely veneer of grand monuments on the top.

Now, to do that, of course, we're going to start with the remains of the buildings. But let's think, too, about the other evidence we can use around that to build up a full picture the testimony that Romans wrote down and that survives for us to read, the pictures they put on the coins, inscriptions on the buildings themselves, pictures, statues, poems, everything we can get to get a sense of how this city worked, functioned, appeared, resonated in antiquity and down to the modern era. Another tool that we'll be using in this course is a huge 3D digital model of the ancient city that I've built over the last few years at the University of Reading for teaching my students. And by flying around this model or walking through it, we can maybe get a glimpse or a sense of how the city may have appeared all these years ago.

?University of Reading 2017

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