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ROME OS: Ghosts in the machine

Activity: Academic and Industrial events › Guest lecture or Invited talk

Description

What happens when anachronisms speak to a timeline that never was? This paper examines the canonical mythos of Rome’s site as a former rustic idyll—a remarkable nexus of pastoral simplicity, defensible wetlands, and the geo-topographic wherewithal to deliver empire. Creatives, historians, and politicians of the later Republic embraced and enriched this ghostly underlay. It grounded aetiological poetry, flickered through rites and rituals, and lingered in the toponyms and cult-sites that sustained the common good.
I argue that the layered ‘anachronism’ of the primal cityscape—present across literary, antiquarian, and material registers—is itself a fiction: a spectral past propping up Roman citizenship as anachronistic by design. The watery valleys, upland woods, and sites of mystery are constructs, conduits for the necessarily old-fashioned reliquary traits of the Founding Fathers. Rome’s landmarks memorialise an imagined archaic environmentalism, fashioning an originary ambience rich with signs of nature’s benevolence.
The melancholy turn—the almost-lost pastoral lingering in real-and-imagined echoes of the landscape that became the city—shores up a narrative of environmental continuity as guarantee of ongoing security. This is anachronism squared: not temporal fracture but fabricated wholeness, nostalgia wielded as core and scaffold for civic infrastructure.
Period14 May 2026 → 15 May 2026
Event titleCity-Images and Anachronism: Strategies of Temporal Fracture in Visual, Textual and Built Environments.
Event typeConference
LocationKiel, GermanyShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • Rome
  • anomaly
  • anachronism
  • identity
  • urbanism
  • myth
  • ecology
  • environment
  • Italy

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