Here is an aerial view of the ancient city of Rome is as it would have looked circa 320 AD during the reign of Emperor Constantine. Looking as we are from the South East, starting from the left, you can see a bend in the Tiber river and the boat-shaped island of Tiberini. The half circular building next to it is the Theatre of Marcellus and raised and slightly to the right of that is the Capitol with its Temple dedicated to Jupiter. In the foreground is the enormous Circus Maximus, a venue for racing chariots which had a seating capacity of a quarter of a million. To the right of this is the palace complex on Palatine Hill and feeding into this is an aqueduct which snakes itself past the square perimeter of the Temple of the Divine Claudius. Directly above this is the elliptical shape of the Amphitheatre Flavius (better known today as the Colosseum). To the right of this are the magnificent grounds of the Baths of Trajan. The expanse of densely packed buildings behind the Colosseum is the sprawling and (somewhat disreputable) commercial district known as Subura.

This model at 1:400 scale was built over a thirty year period from the 1930s to the 1960s by Italian Gismondi (1887-1974). It is housed at the Museo della Civiltà Romana in Rome.

The ancient city of Rome at this time was urbanised on a scale totally unprecedented in the ancient world. In fact, no city could compare with it until well into the nineteenth century. Of course, as is well known, Rome fell in 476 AD to the Goths but its actual destruction took considerably longer. The city suffered several later waves of attack, especially from the Vandals in 455, the Saracens in 846 and the Normans in 1084 but, violent though these encounters were, the real destroyers of ancient Rome were the Romans themselves. It began in the Middles ages:

The thin slabs of ancient epitaphs were easily adapted into borders and panels or fitted into pavements, which explains why the floors of Romans churches are so richly and irrelevantly inscribed. It is easier to pry a block from a crumbling ruin or dig it out of the Roman earth than to quarry it fresh from the hills of Carrara. Across Italy the competitive ambitions of rising medieval towns created a demand for new churches that seemed endless. Duomos and campaniles needed heavy stone foundations, thick walls, and monumental arches.

As the industry grew, and as the Romans marble cutters' booty exceeded the needs of the local market, they shipped more and more of their wares abroad on light coasting ships for the new cathedrals of Pisa, Lucca, Salerno, Orvieto and Amalfi, among others. Pieces of roman marble can be identified in Charlemagne's cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle, in Westminster Abbey, and in churches in Constantinople.

The medieval lime burners prospered by making cement from the fragments of dismantled temples, baths, theaters, and palaces, and from smashed, marble ornaments and statues. The Sant' Adriano kilns were devoted to burning the marbles of the nearby imperial forums, the Agosta consumed pieces of the mausoleum of Augustus, while La Pigna was fed by fragments torn from the Baths of Agrippa and the Temple of Isis. Temporary kilns were erected in the Baths of Diocletian, near the Villa of Livia, at the Basilica Julia and the Temple of Venus and Rome, and remained there until adjacent materials were exhausted. At the Circus Flaminius the whole district was called the Lime Pit. A Vatican document of July 1, 1426, authorized a company of limeburners to demolish the Basilica Julia on the Sacra Via so that they could feed their kilns with chunks of travertine, on the condition only that the papal authorities receive half of the product.

--- p. 581 The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstein, 1985

But the process of destruction really gained pace during the Renaissance, ironically a time in which Italians slowly began rediscovering their classical past.

If it were in our power to snatch the secret of the origin and former purpose and use of the marbles, stones, and bricks with which our palaces, our cloisters, and our villas have been built and embellished, or to recall to life the masterpieces of Greek and Roman statuary, hammered and ground into dust or burnt into lime, our knowledge of the city of the Caesars would be almost perfect. The rebuilding of S. Peter's alone, from the pontificate of Martin V. to that of Pius VII, caused more destruction, did more injury to ancient classic remains, than ten centuries of so‑called barbarism. Of the huge and almost incredible mass of marbles, of every nature, color, value, and description, used in building S. Peter's, until the beginning of the present century, not an inch, not an atom, comes from modern quarries; they were all removed from classic buildings, many of which were levelled to the ground for the sake of one or two pieces only.

In order not to wander too far from the main subject, I will cite one item only of these annals of destruction: I will mention what happened in the valley of the Forum between 1540 and 1549. In less than ten years' time, the men employed by the contractors of S. Peter's to search for building materials crossed the valley of the Forum from end to end, like an appalling meteor, destroying, dismantling, splitting into fragments, burning into lime, the temples, the arches, the basilicas most famous in Roman history, in the history of the Old World, together with the inscriptions which indicated their former use or design, and the statues and bas-reliefs which ornamented them. In 1540, the podium, step, and pediment of the temple of Antoninus and Faustina were removed to S. Peter's or otherwise made use of. Between 1541 and 1545 the same fate befell the triumphal arch raised in honor of Fabius Maximus, the conqueror of Savoy; the triumphal arch raised in honor of Augustus after the battle of Actium; the temple of Romulus, son of Maxentius; and a portion of the Cloaca Maxima. In 1546 the temple of Julius Caesar was levelled to the ground, together with the Fasti Consulares and Triumphales engraved on its marble basement; in 1547 the temple of Castor and Pollux was dismantled; in 1549 the temple of Vesta, the temple of Augustus, and the shrine of Vortumnus.

I have not mentioned this sad page of the history of Roman monuments to vituperate or condemn to excess the memory of the authors of so great a destruction, — popes, princes, artists, who, after all, in lieu of the ruins destroyed by them, raised and left to us monuments and edifices which, in beauty and perfection, will bear comparison with the old ones. I have mentioned the subject because it strikes me as one of the most curious and inexplicable problems in the history of art, — the fact that the great masters of the Renaissance and the cinquecento, ardent admirers as they were of ancient architectural and plastic works, should have taken willingly their share in that abominable crusade. One must examine carefully, sheet by sheet, the note-books and studies left by such men as Michael Angelo, Baldassare Peruzzi, Silvestro Peruzzi, Antonio di Sangallo, Sangallo il Gobbo, Bramante Lazzari, Antonio Dosio, Piero Santo Bartoli, Giovanni da Udine, as I have done myself, to get the true idea, to fathom with the right line their immense love and admiration for ancient art. Even the most obscure and uninteresting bits and fragments of mouldings were taken up by them as subjects of study and investigation. However, all this love, all this admiration, was purely platonic and material: they all considered ancient remains and architectural masterpieces not as things of beauty in themselves, worth being respected and cared for, as we do now; they looked upon them as a simple means of learning art, and of perfecting themselves in the practice of their profession. When they had got from the original all the advantage which they thought it capable of affording, they abandoned it to its fate, as an altogether useless thing.

[...]

There is no longer any doubt that the Romans have done more harm to their own city than all invading hosts put together. The action of centuries and of natural phenomena, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and inundations, could not have accompanied what men have, willingly and deliberately.

--- Chapter 6, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries by Rodolfo Lanciani (published 1898)

   

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