He was, in a very deep way, absolutely right. In private writings he phrased this more personally, that he was terrified of ever visiting Rome because he was terrified of the idea of all the layers and layers and layers of destroyed structures hidden under the surface, at the same time present and absent, visible and invisible. In formal treatises, he compared the psyche to an ancient city, with many layers of architecture built one on top of another, each replacing the last, but with the old structures still present underneath. And that road.Д«ut Freud had a second fear: a fear of RomeвЂ™s layers. RomeвЂ™s layers: ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, modern, all jumbled together in an insoluble stack of meaning and contradictions. Freud was one of many young intellectuals in Germany, Poland, and other parts of Europe who were terribly intimidated by the Idea of Rome, and the sense that their own nations could never approach its greatness. Italians did this as a power play to try to overcome the political weakness of Italy, but as a result, in the 19th and 18th centuries, many intellectuals in many nations were brought up in a mindset of constantly measuring their own nations only by how far they fell short of the imagined perfection of Rome. EuropeвЂ™s never-fading memory of the greatness of the Roman empire was intentionally magnified in the Renaissance by Italian humanists who set out to convince the world that Roman culture was the best culture, and that the only way to achieve true greatness was to slavishly imitate the noble Romans. Part of it was a cultural inferiority complex. He fretted for decades before finally making the visit. You can see it in his letters, and the many times he uses Rome as a simile or metaphor for psychological issues, both broadly and his own. (As a bonus to anyone whoвЂ™s been to Rome, this will also tell you why itвЂ™s a particularly physically grueling city to visit, compared to, say, Florence or Paris.) Going age by age, I will attempt to show how the cityвЂ™s history and structure are one and the same, and how this real ancient city shows her past in a far more organic and structural way than what we tend invent when we concoct fictitious ancient capitals to populate fantasy worlds or imagined futures. RomeвЂ™s past shows not only in her monuments and ruins, but in the very layout of the streets themselves. The different parts of RomeвЂ™s past left their fingerprints on the cityвЂ™s shape in far more direct ways than one tends to realize, even from visiting and walking through the city. What I intend to discuss instead is the geographic city, and how its shape and layers grew gradually and constantly, shaped by famous events, but also by the centuries you wonвЂ™t hear much about in a traditional history of the city.

We all know the long, rich history of the Roman people, and the cityвЂ™s importance as the center of an empire, and thereafter as the center of the memory of that empire, whose echo, long after its end, still so defines Western concepts of power, authority and peace. This curious range of reactions seems the perfect moment for me to discuss something I have intended to talk about for some time: the shape of the City of Rome itself. The road in question, running along the Forum. Reactions have ranged from commutersвЂ™ groans to declarations from classicists that this single act proves the nobility of the human species.

The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the cityвЂ™s central roads, theВ Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the worldвЂ™s largest archaeological park.

Grand ages rome city layout