The Archaeology of Twentieth-Century Rome

When Rome became the capital of a unified Italian state in 1871, the city lagged behind other European capitals in contemporary architectural expression. Ancient ruins evoked a distant glory, although the area of Rome containing the Imperial Fora was covered over by a dense urban residential quarter called the Alessandrino District. The quarter was labelled a slum district by fascist propaganda, and it was demolished in the early 1930s to make way for a parade avenue, the Via dell’Impero. This article presents a discussion of the cultural and socio-economic nature of the Alessandrino District in the decades before its destruction, combining results from the Danish-Italian excavations at Caesar’s Forum with a selection of archival data and historical accounts. The findings presented here indicate that a newly investigated area of the Alessandrino District was in fact not a slum district but rather a thriving middle-class residential and commercial area.