ancient cities

158 City of Memory
See also Urban Geography; Urban Planning; Urban
Semiotics
Further Readings
Buisseret, David, ed. 1998. Envisioning the City: Six
Studies in Urban Cartography. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Elliott, James. n.d. The City in Maps: Urban Mapping to
1900. London: British Library.
Harley, J. B. and David Woodward, eds. 1987, 1994.
The History of Cartography. 2 vols. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Ci t y o f ME M o r y
Cities and their relationship to memory have been
the subject of analysis by authors and scholars in
psychology, history, critical theory, philosophy,
and architectural theory. This rich body of work
has elaborated on several relevant issues, here
briefly summarized: the persistence of the past in
the city of the present, the metaphor of the city as
a palimpsest, and the dialectic of cities and memory—that
is, their relationship of dependence,
denial, selection, or manipulation of memory.
The persistence of traces of the past in the city
of the present is investigated in fragments of
Walter Benjamin’s work on the Parisian arcades;
in these writings he codifies an aesthetic of the City
of Memory through the metaphor of archaeological
layering: “Each street is a vertiginous experience.
The street conducts the flâneur into a
vanished time”; thus the city is “an epic book
through and through, a process of memorizing
while strolling around.” The city is described as a
labyrinthine archaeological landscape in which
traces of lives, customs, and events already extinguished
still survive. Walking through the streets
of Paris, he contends, the multiple layers of history
unfold before our very eyes.
In the introduction to The Architecture of the City,
Aldo Rossi poetically describes the city as an open-air
archive of collective and personal memories:
Architecture, attesting to the tastes and attitudes
of generations, to public events and private tragedies,
to new and old facts, is the fixed stage for
human events [. . . . ] One need only look at the
layers of the city that archaeologists show us;
they appear as a primordial and eternal fabric of
life, an immutable pattern.
Recalling the images of disemboweled houses of
European cities after the bombings of World War
II, he too compares the city of the present to an
archaeological landscape marked by the traces of
past events, by personal memories as well as epic
events.
The metaphor of the palimpsest has been paramount
in the literature about cities and memory.
According to its Greek etymology, the term palimpsest
refers to papyruses or parchments whose ink
was scraped off and written on again, with the earlier
writing incompletely erased and still visible
beneath the surface. Freud was the first to use
the metaphor of the Roman palimpsest to
describe the structure of the human unconscious in
his psychoanalytic research. In Civilization and Its
Discontents, Freud recognized a similarity between
the layered construction of cities, made of gradual
additions and erasures, and the human psyche:
“Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but
a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious
past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing
that has once come into existence will have passed
away and all the earlier phases of development
continue to exist alongside the latest one.”
Also José Munoz Millanes compares the city to
a palimpsest on which time leaves its indelible
mark. Its built environment “comes to be the testimony
par excellence of daily life, because in its
fixity the vicissitudes of humankind are registered
throughout time.”
Freud’s metaphor of the Roman palimpsest has
proven particularly useful in the analysis of a city’s
relationship to memory. Classical Rome, medieval
Rome, renaissance Rome, baroque Rome, eighteenthcentury
Rome, postunification Rome, fascist Rome,
and reconstruction Rome are all present in today’s
Rome, overlapped together in a multilayered urban
ensemble.
An aesthetic of contrasts and overlapping is the
paradigm of the City of Memory. Its multilayered
character, made of centuries of additions and subtractions,
allows for a reading of the city as a composite
of innumerable stories. As the permanence
of the past in the present form of the city may