reenactment season [first recognized]
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 yesterday) was the 20th century's last (and perhaps only) reenactment of ancient Rome's Triumphal Way, a tradition roughly 2700 years old.
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 life, 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 Campi Martii 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?
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