Roberto Piperno has found a good use for hypertext: stand where an eighteenth-century engraver stood and keep clicking backward through Rome.
Visit Rome Art Lover’s Porta Pinciana page
The page centers on plate number 2 from Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand View of Rome, published in 1747. Vasi showed Porta Pinciana when it was a relatively minor opening in the Aurelian Walls, used largely for access to suburban villas.
Piperno then puts the old engraving beside the city that followed it.
There is a modern photograph, a small 1748 map, notes on neighboring gates, links into Rome’s historic rioni, architectural details, inscriptions, tombs and sections of the ancient wall. Instead of treating Vasi’s print as a decorative antique, the page uses it as a coordinate system.
One gate, about seventeen centuries of modifications
Porta Pinciana began as a small opening in the walls built under Emperor Aurelian in the third century. The page notes that it was enlarged under Honorius in 402 and strengthened by Belisarius after the Byzantine reconquest of Rome in 536.
By Vasi’s time the gate had a much quieter role.
It was closed in 1808 after the Borghese expanded their estate and created another entrance to Villa Borghese. It reopened in 1887 as the surrounding city changed again.
That pattern continues into the twentieth century. Piperno connects the walls to road construction around the 1960 Rome Olympics, archaeological discoveries made during infrastructure work, and even the conversion of some wall towers into houses or studios.
The page is also full of the small details that make specialist websites useful. A gate associated with Villa Medici carries inscriptions inviting guests into the gardens. A Roman sarcophagus found nearby is discussed through its decoration. A reconstructed tomb uncovered during sewer or road work becomes another layer in the same landscape.
And because this is a personal site rather than a museum kiosk, a red Fiat 500 parked by the wall can earn a sentence too.
That is not a flaw.
It is how walking through a city actually works. Monument, inscription, traffic project, ancient tomb, little red car.
Rome Art Lover turns Vasi’s engravings into a sprawling visual index of change. The old plate is never merely “then,” and the photograph is never merely “now.” Links lead sideways into villas, roads, districts, monuments and other Vasi plates until the city becomes a network rather than a timeline.
The modern Web loves before-and-after sliders.
Piperno built the scholarly version: before, after, map, footnote, detour, another century, another click.