Resumen de Porticus Pompeiana: a new perspective on the first public park of ancient Rome
The term porticus, or colonnade, does not immediately bring to mind a garden, nor did it to Romans of the first century BC. In 55 BC, however, the general Pompey the Great presented the public with a porticus surrounding a nemus, or grove, so delightful and significant in the life of the city that when they referred to the many subsequent imitations as porticus, they envisioned gardens. By the first century AD, porticus were the urban parks of central Rome. This essay uses planimetric and perspectival drawings to examine how Pompey's designer used the porticus to choreograph the visitors' visual perception of the grove in relationship to the surrounding architecture: a theater, temple, senate-house, basilica and markets, known collectively as the opera Pompeiana. The results demonstrate that the complex was highly ordered, with principles of scaenographia, or perspective, employed to focus the vision of the visitor on politically significant juxtapositions of architectural and garden elements, composed into a unified narrative by the central porticus.
