Good news should be celebrated, because in the end, hearing it brings joy, it sets imaginations, brains, wills, techniques, sciences, both pure and applied, in motion. I'll come and explain!
The reconstruction of a colonnade of the Basilica Ulpia, overlooking Trajan's Column, has been announced, and this goes hand in hand with the elimination of the useless Via Alessandrina, which cut the wide view of Trajan's Markets in two, which can now be appreciated in their entirety and majesty. With this brilliant choice, a modern, uninhibited archaeological vision is being advanced, no longer seen as praise for ruin, for barbaric catastrophe, made up of haphazardly piled stones, but as an ordered reading of historical civilisation, which is being given a second life, enhanced and valued, within a composition that is not that of ’romantic“ chance, of ”look, be moved, and move on," but rather of knowledge, study, and understanding.
To learn more from stones that have been ruined by distant time and that can come back to life, hale and hearty, among us, with philology, with rigour, without falsification, without Cecil B. DeMille-style showmanship; the great story, it goes
respected, cared for, because it can be a fundamental lesson for our present, because it can reaffirm a stylistic comparison with beauty, with proportion, which is what we most need today, to have a past that gives numbers to our desire for
future. A lesson in aesthetics and a pedagogy, which serves life and not an useless “how we were”, as is the case with the temple complex of Selinunte in Sicily or the Column of Phocas, next to the Curia of the Forum. Why Selinunte is not re-erected is a very small and ridiculous mystery, given that the whole thing is laid out on the ground and in the Salinas of Palermo, metopes and triglyphs are also preserved, and what is being waited for to put a serious description on the emerald column, in memory of the visit of Phocas, the Constantinopolitan basileus, which does not make one think of an incursion of monk seals into Rome…!?
And the Forma Urbis of Septimius Severus comes to mind, which was displayed in an imposing Hall, next to the Basilica of Maxentius… . Why wait to reconstruct it with the many beautiful existing fragments?!. But… in the meantime, let's applaud the great Trajan…!
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
Italiano 
English (UK)