Ricerc@Sapienza

The paper aims to study the mutual relationships that have characterized the dialectic between archaeology and restoration in the past two centuries, with different results. In a complex scenery such as the centre of Rome and its stratigraphy, some episodes related to a specific and most representative urban area - the one surrounding the Trajan's Column - will be analysed.
The deep analysis of a series of intervention that, starting from the nineteenth-century urban arrangement of the archaeological remains of the Basilica Ulpia and the subsequent, discussed, architectural completion of the southern front of the Palazzo Valentini, lead up to the recent, innovative experience of virtual enhancement of the Roman domus rediscovered below the same building, allows to reason on consolidated practices and new challenges in understanding and valorising the palimpsest, between past and present.