Rodolfo Lanciani

Rodolfo Amedeo Lanciani (1 January 1845 – 22 May 1929) was an Italian archaeologist, a pioneering student of ancient Roman topography. Among his many excavations was that of the House of the Vestals in the Roman Forum. Lanciani’s great work was the production of a map of the ancient city of Rome, a “unique work within the genre”. It shares the (modern) name of the ancient (Severan) marble map, the Forma Urbis Romae. It is a set of 46 detailed maps of ancient Rome, issued in 1893–1901. The maps measure 25 by 36 inches, at a scale of 1:1000. The map outlines ancient features in black, early modern features (based on the Nolli map of 1748) in red, and modern features (as of 1893) in blue. The modern Atlas of Ancient Rome by Andrea Carandini is a “systematic update… and a reformulation of the information” of Lanciani’s Forma Urbis.