Years ago, when I was a college student studying in Rome, I visited the Abbey of Monte Cassino. I remember being impressed by my first sight of the building, poised on a steep hill against an amphitheater of snow-dusted mountains. I walked across the echoing cloister and entered the abbey church, which shone with baroque splendor. As I stood by the altar, looking up at the gilded ceiling, I had to remind myself that it was all fake.
In February of 1944, assuming – wrongly – that German troops were stationed inside, the allies dropped thousands of tons of high explosives on Monte Cassino, completely destroying the Abbey. After the war, it was rebuilt so comprehensively that a visitor who didn’t know otherwise would assume that the abbey had remained unchanged for centuries.
When I returned to Rome, I began to notice how many of the city’s iconic ancient buildings were also reconstructed. The Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum, for example, was destroyed during the Renaissance when workmen stripped its marble for re-use in St. Peter’s Basilica. The structure we see today was built in 1930 with the few surviving fragments.
The Curia, the meeting place of the Roman Senate, was rebuilt around the same time. It had served as a church for 13 centuries, and during that time part of the back wall, the upper halves of both side walls, and large chunks of the façade had been lost. Less than 50% of the building we see today is actually ancient. Even less of the Arch of Titus is original. When the monument was incorporated into a castle during the Middle Ages, the outer parts of both piers were cut away, a tower was built on top, and a ramp was cut through the foundations. The structure was so badly damaged that it had to be dismantled and painstakingly reassembled in 1822, with travertine replacing its missing marble blocks. Even the Colosseum has been substantially rebuilt. During the 1830s, Pope Gregory XVI remade a large part of the missing south side in brick. The only section of seating inside the amphitheater dates to a 1930s restoration effort, and huge parts of the hypogeum have been demolished and reconstructed.
Perhaps the most remarkable restored monument in Rome is the Ara Pacis. Shattered by earthquakes and buried in waterlogged soil under the fragile foundations of a Renaissance palazzo, this magnificent Augustan altar seemed impossible to excavate. But in 1937, in a colossal feat of engineering that involved raising the overhanging palazzo on concrete pilings and freezing the mud beneath, archaeologists dug down to the altar, recovered its decorative elements, which had shattered into hundreds of fragments, and reassembled them on a modern superstructure. The Italian government did not invest millions in this project out of some abstract appreciation for antiquity. The Ara Pacis was reconstructed to serve as the centerpiece of a Fascist exposition that celebrated the 2000th anniversary of Augustus’ birth – and hinted, none too subtly, that Mussolini was the new Augustus.
Ancient buildings have often been restored or rebuilt in the service of a political agenda. Among the earliest examples are the restorations of the Theater of Pompey, Colosseum, and other buildings in Rome by Theodoric in the sixth century to demonstrate his allegiance to the Roman elite and Roman tradition. During the Middle Ages, the citizens of Verona reconstructed parts of their Roman arena as a symbol of civic pride. In 1533, Francis I of France ordered the medieval neighborhood inside the Roman amphitheater of Nimes to be cleared, so that one of the most imposing antiquities in his kingdom would be returned to its original glory. Henri IV of France, likewise, ordered the clearing of the amphitheater at Arles and commanded a Roman obelisk found nearby to be erected in its arena. His contemporary Pope Sixtus V raised and moved a whole series of Roman obelisks, making them focal points of new avenues that connected Rome’s pilgrimage churches. This was just the beginning.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the new science of archaeology combined with the rising spirit of nationalism to drive the reconstruction of many ruins. One example is the Saalburg, a Roman fort near Bad Homburg, Germany that was reconstructed at the turn of the twentieth century under the auspices of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Roman Baths in Bath, England, excavated and rebuilt between 1878 and 1883, are a product of the same era. In their case, however, the factor behind restoration was not nationalism, but tourism – a gamble that paid off, as the hundreds of thousands who still visit the baths each year attest. With the advent of mass tourism in the second half of the twentieth century, enhancing visitor experience became the single most important factor in the reconstruction of ancient buildings and sites. A well-known early example is the Palace of Minos at Knossos, restored by its excavator Sir Arthur Evans. Evans worked at Knossos from 1900 to 1931, uncovering the most impressive center of what he dubbed the Minoan Civilization. As more and more of the vast Bronze Age palace came to light, it became clear that the newly excavated ruins needed to be consolidated and protected. Evans’ solution, controversially, was to rebuild much of the palace in reinforced concrete. Equally controversially, the restored interiors were painted with frescoes invented on the basis of a few scattered fragments.
Some sites have been even more extensively reconstructed. For modern visitors to Athens, the most prominent building in the Agora is the Stoa of Attalus. Built in the second century BC, this long, two-story portico was destroyed by barbarian raiders in late antiquity. Little more than the back wall and foundations survived to be excavated. Between 1953 and 1956, however, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens – with generous financial assistance from John D. Rockefeller Jr. – reconstructed the stoa as the agora museum. The replica is as accurate as the archaeologists could make it. Careful measurements were made of the existing ruins, and every available fragment was incorporated into the structure. Quarries were even opened in the hills around Athens, to ensure that the new stone would match the old. Only the design of the interior was modified, to accommodate the museum exhibits. Besides its contribution to the experience of an important archaeological site and tourist attraction, the reconstructed Stoa of Attalus was a clear symbol of American and Western commitment at a time when Greece stood on the front lines of the Cold War. It was also an expression of an older tradition – both western and Greek nationalist – that privileged classical antiquity over all other periods. The project’s American donors saw the new stoa as a monument to democracy, ancient and modern. Many Greek archaeologists, however, were inclined to interpret it as American colonialism.
The controversies of restoration are equally potent on the Athenian Acropolis. Over the past two centuries, every structure on the Acropolis has been at least partially rebuilt – initially in the service of Greek nationalism, and later to enhance the experience of a site visited by millions of tourists. The little Temple of Athena Nike has been completely dismantled and reconstructed three times. The Odeion of Herodes Atticus was comprehensively rebuilt in the 1950s. The Parthenon has been under reconstruction more
Thanks MND.
these buildings are not fakes.
They are restorations of beloved buildings damaged by wars or floods.
dont buy into leftist notions that Western civ is based on FAKE.
Thank you for a marvelous compendium of info.
Personally, I prefer having the ruins of the Parthenon on the acropolis and the to-scale reproduction in Nashville, so that if you want to feel what it was like you go to TN, and if you want to see what is, you go to Athens.
Stonehenge has been reassembled to what it looks like now. Has concrete bases, iirc
American archaeologists excavated the Agora beginning in the 1930s and did a magnificent job. The Stoa of Attalus displays the most important finds from the excavations. Tourists flock to the Agora and Greece benefits from the tourist dollars. But they resent Americans as colonialists?
Greece has a lot of ancient sites, some famous, others less so. They have doled out a few to foreigners to exavate (Americans, Germans, French, British, etc.). The US got the Agora, the excavations at Ancient Corinth, and maybe one or two others. The French got Delphi. The Germans got Olympia, etc.
Greece in the 1930s was very poor--could they have afforded to do a proper job on the Athenian Agora?