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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Recent events at St. Peter's Square, in Rome, have demonstrated, among other things, the virtues of a piazza. Three million people entered Rome in the course of about five days, and almost all of them came to the piazza outside the basilica. Bernini, the piazza's main architect, conceived the square (which is actually oval) in the seventeenth century as a site of pilgrimage, although he might not have imagined what could happen when Christian zeal is combined with mass tourism. Nevertheless, apart from a few minor incidents, everyone in the square behaved. For the people waiting outside it, in a line to view Pope John Paul II's body which stretched for more than three miles, the arms of Bernini's great flanking colonnades were ahead, like a big stone hug ready to enfold pilgrims and sightseers alike at the end of their ordeal.
The line snaked across the Vittorio Emanuele II bridge, upriver along the eastern bank of the Tiber, and almost as far as another square, Piazza Augusto Imperatore. If St. Peter's Square is a model for all the good things a piazza can be, Piazza Augusto is an example of all the things that can go wrong. Instead of the generously open space of St. Peter's, there's a large pile of earth and rock blocking the middle of this piazza, which houses the tomb of Augustus, Rome's first emperor. Its ancient stones are covered with a ragged crown of cypress trees.
The base of this uncharacteristically neglected-looking ruin has been excavated down to Year Zero, the street level two millennia ago, which was eighteen feet lower than the urban surface today; the area around the base now serves mainly as a toilet for dogs. Above this pit, on two sides of the piazza are Fascist-style facades of buildings constructed under Mussolini. On a third side are two Baroque churches, attached to another thirties building, and on the fourth side is the monumental sculptural frieze known as the Ara Pacis, or Altar of Peace, an early masterpiece of Roman art which was dedicated by Augustus in 9 B.C. If you line it up right, you can fit two thousand years of architectural history and three great eras of Roman builders (the emperors, the Popes, and the Fascists) in a single snapshot.
However, while the individual structures are interesting, they don't work together. There's something wrong with the over-all scale of the square. A piazza can be intimate, like Piazza Mattei, in the Ghetto, which is just big enough to hold its delightful turtle fountain, or it can be expansive, like Piazza Venezia, where Mussolini staged his big rallies. But whether it serves as the site of an impromptu soccer game, a political demonstration, or a pilgrimage, a piazza must always function as a stage for acting out scenes from the drama of everyday life. On this level, Piazza Augusto fails completely. It is a dente cariato, a rotten tooth--an abscess in Rome's idea of its own perfection.
The story of Piazza Augusto Imperatore is a tale of how the city that invented civic architecture stopped creating it, except at its edges, where ugly postwar housing developments have spoiled the once famous campagna romana. It begins more than two thousand years ago, in the early days of the Roman Empire, with the construction of the mausoleum of Augustus, and it runs through Mussolini and his massive new architectural program for Rome with the piazza at its heart. Now it involves contemporary Roman politics, the celebrated American architect Richard Meier, and a fervid argument over the place of modern buildings in Rome.
In 1993, Rome elected as its mayor Francesco Rutelli, a thirty-nine-year-old star of the left, and, like many previous Roman leaders, he came to power with an itch to build. Rutelli's height, piercing green eyes, and American-style communication skills earned him the nickname Clintonino, or Little Clinton. He had a number of plans to rejuvenate the Eternal City. "I think cities are like languages," Rutelli told me. "If a language doesn't change, grow, and evolve, it dies. It is the same with cities--a city must be transformed from time to time."
One obvious means of effecting that transformation is to commission a dramatic new building. All the other major European cities have done this, from Daniel Libeskind's star-shaped Jewish Museum, in Berlin, to Richard Rogers's Millennium Dome, in London, and Richard Meier's Museum of Contemporary Art, in Barcelona. Even if people detest the building (the Dome, for example, was vilified by many Londoners), they talk about it, and the debate gives the city a youthful energy that the Colosseum and the Pantheon can't provide all by themselves.
Shortly after Rutelli was elected, he was invited by the mayor of Barcelona, Pasqual Maragall, to see Richard Meier's museum there, and he was enchanted by it. The following year, he met Meier, in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Summit; both were participating in a seminar on the future of cities. Afterward, they spoke about the possibility of Meier's designing a new museum to house the Ara Pacis, on the west side of Piazza Augusto. Rutelli wanted the building ready for the Year 2000 celebrations, a major event in Rome, and he proposed that it would be partially funded by corporate sponsors, in this case a consortium of three banks that had supported other...
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