Palimpsests | Roma

An impossible geography of Rome meant to lay bare an alternative way to make the city readable again through its past and despite it.

/- gr. palímpsestos in Ancient Greek means “scraped again”

(pálin- ‘again’ and a deriv. of psân ‘to scrape’)

Rome is a palimpsest—a stratification of space and time in incalculable combinations. A shifting equilibrium, an incessant process of writing and overwriting, of uses and reuses, voids and traces, splinters and imprints.

Despite relentless tourist trivialization and the instrumentalization of its history, Rome remains an archetype of contemporaneity, not merely the residence of crystallized, misunderstood antiquity.

To hold a mirror before Rome is to create the premise for confronting its present, reimagining its future, and prefiguring its destiny. Palimpsests restores multiplicity to a city interrupted, interdicted from building community, traversed by political and economic forces that drain space of life and saturate it with commodities.