Botteghe oscure: history of a millennial street

SERIES: Landscapes of downtown Rome 
SPEAKER: Daniele Manacorda, archaeologist
DATE: Thursday, April 4, 6 p.m. 
 
Via delle Botteghe Oscure is one of the most famous streets in Rome. The lecture will outline its long history starting from the Roman age, when the area stood outside the city walls at the edge of the vast plain of the Campus Martius. Based on the results of research conducted for decades in the so-called Crypta Balbi block, the events of the street will accompany those of the surrounding neighborhood throughout the imperial age, into the centuries of the Middle Ages, which saw first its deconstruction and then its revival, when the Botteghe, not yet obscure, became the street of merchants: a long, narrow straight stretch, overlooked by Renaissance palaces and churches, until its twentieth-century widening, which gave it the face of a central artery of city traffic.

Daniele Manacorda has taught archaeology at the universities of Siena and Roma 3. He has worked on urban history (Crypta Balbi, Archaeology and History of an Urban Landscape, 2001; Landscapes of Medieval Rome, 2021; Rome. The Tale of Two Cities, 2022), material culture, the methods of archaeology (Lessons in Archaeology, 2008) and its role in contemporary society (The Archaeologist's Trade, 2020; The Books of Others, 2021), cultural heritage policies (Italy to the Italians, 2014; Posgarù, 2022). 

Free admission while seats last
Reservations at the following link.