getting an idea 11 September 1997
2003.08.05 15:11
[When I write notes, I do it long hand. The notes are then subsequently transcribed via word processing, sometimes a few days later, but now-a-days several months later.]
The following is archived within the design-l archive.
reenactment season begins
2000.09.07 13:13
This past week three years ago witnessed the death of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and architect Aldo Rossi.
Diana's funeral (three years ago today) was the 20th century's last (and perhaps only) reenactment of ancient Rome's Triumphal Way, a tradition roughly 2700 years old.
note to self: 1997.09.05
CAMPO MARZIO - the triumphal way
I just found an article in RITUAL on the story/meaning of the Triumphal Way in ancient Rome. I am in the midst of reading it now, so I cannot make any final conclusion. I do now know, however, that the route that Piranesi delineated starts at the alter of Mars and continues as it enters the city at the Porta Triumphant. This makes me have to reconsider the "profane to sacred" architectural promenade, although I will still mention it except as an inversion (Just now - 9.11.97 - I realize that [the] realm of the profane and the sacred did invert itself in Rome with the conversion to Christianity from Paganism. Perhaps Piranesi is making a very real commentary on the reversal in ancient Rome's history and its meaning as a city. I am especially thinking of how the temple of Janus sits at one of the ends (beginning?) of Piranesi's Triumphal Way, and this also gives ground to the backward/forward reversal notion. I think I have a full thesis here now.) Perhaps the whole notion of inversion becomes a/the dominant theme that I have to present overall. (We shall see.)
There are many references throughout the [RITUAL] article to Rykwert's THE IDEA OF A TOWN and this reinforces my need to read that book. I am glad to have found all this new information, and it will undoubtedly add to the credibility of what I ultimately write. I only hope I don't continue to find more data that needs to be considered because it seems that I am never going to achieve a sense of completion.
note to self: 1997.09.07
Diana and the Triumphal Way
Just two days (Thursday) before Diana's funeral service, I came across an article on the Triumphal Way in Ancient Rome. I found it in the first issue of RITUAL, which I have owned since it came out in 1983. I was not mindful of the essay's existence, and I was happy to find it because of my current work regarding Piranesi' CAMPO MARZIO which has the route of the Triumphal Way demarcated within it.
I read and finished the essay between late Thursday night and late Friday night. It addressed the notion of the elusive Triumphal Arch and the meaning of the passage of the Triumphator into the city, and then through the city. It also spoke of the monuments that were pasted by in the course of the procession and how they were, over time, steadily incorporated into the ritual. It also spoke of how the crowds were also an integral part of the procession and ritual -- the manifestors of the social mirror, the reflective lens of the "see and be seen" phenomena.
Mere hours after having finished the essay I was watching Princess Diana's funeral service. I turned on the television just as Earl Spencer, Prince William, Prince Harry, Prince Charles, and Prince Philip joined the procession, taking their place behind Diana's coffin. As the procession made its way to Westminster Abbey, the television commentators called out the various monuments and landmarks: Victoria Fountain, Hyde Park, the Lutyen's Cenotaph at Whitehall. When I saw the coffin pass through an arch however, I realized that I was indeed witnessing Diana's Triumphal Way.
No one today actually knows what it was like to have been alive during the Pax Romanus. Since Diana's funeral, those alive today, at least know how a Triumphal Way manifests.
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No doubt Mother Teresa's life and death manifest a Triumphal Way as well. Mother Teresa's triumph was not a single grand event, however, rather her entire life.
So where does architect Aldo Rossi fit in this happening of live, death and triumphal way? Oddly enough, the answer lies again within ancient Rome by way of Piranesi's CAMPO MARZIO. There is a documented but not too often recognized direct relation between Piranesi's design of the Bustum (place where bodies are burned and buried) Hadriani and Rossi's design of Modena Cemetery. Piranesi's design constitutes an axis of death, and Rossi discovered this death axis quite some time ago, for it reappears in his cemetery at Modena.
Piranesi's axis of death-Rossi within the Ichnographia Campo Marzio is adjacent to where the Triumphal Way-Diana begins, which is in the Vatican valley-Mother Teresa.
The ancient Romans, moderns that they were not, took augury very seriously. Augury is not taken seriously at all in our modern times, but does that necessarily mean the signs stopped being there?
[If anyone today, 5 August 2003, wonders if the above "9.11.97" might mean 9 November 1997 instead of 11 September 1997, consider the fact that Piranesi himself died 9 November 1778. Even the inversion works.]
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