This Enormous 100-Year-Old Map of Rome is Still the City's Best

[Peter1469]

Wow, the map is almost as tall as a two-story building!

This Enormous 100-Year-Old Map of Rome is Still the City's Best

A 1901 map of Rome is arguably the best map ever made of the most mapped city in human history. The map, created by archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani, documents the city in meticulous detail from its ancient past through the end of the 19th century.

The map is huge. Fully assembled, it’s roughly 17 feet by 24 feet. Lanciani published it as 46 separate sheets over the course of eight years.


Lanciani’s map is color coded, so that the ancient and medieval parts of the city are depicted in black, early modern parts are red, and modern parts are blue (from Lanciani’s perspective, modern meant anything after about 1871, when Rome became the capital of a newly unified Italy).


“It’s one of the first attempts to show the different periods of historic Rome on a map,” says Allan Ceen, an urban historian and collaborator on the MappingRome project, which seeks to draw on and digitize a variety of historical sources to map centuries of changes to Rome.

Map pics at link.