Crypta

But how amazing would it be if the new subway station walkways and escalator shafts could themselves become Crypta Balbi-like museums of buried stratigraphy?

BLDGBLOG 2009

Ironically, in a museum that preserves the urban structures of each era equally, during the medieval period the Crypta actually housed one of the city's largest lime-kilns, where the marble inscriptions, statues, and building blocks of classical Rome were brought to be crushed and melted down into lime (a key ingredient in the cement needed to build the city's new Christian architecture).

BLDGBLOG 2009

It is this series of transformations and reuses of both the Crypta and the urban space it occupies, rather than the fragmentary ancient ruins, that the museum aims to make visible.

BLDGBLOG 2009

There isn't much of the original Crypta left to see-a reconstructed stucco arch, and the massive travertine and tufa walls that now serve as foundations for modern houses in Via delle Botteghe Oscure and Via dei Delfini.

BLDGBLOG 2009

Nonetheless, the Theater and Crypta thrived, and they are depicted intact on a chunk of the Severan

BLDGBLOG 2009

For example, as early as the time of monumental "public latrine was inserted into a section of the Crypta.

BLDGBLOG 2009