Exploring the Urbanism of Roman Mediterranean Ports: from iconographic data to 3D reconstruction

Under the Roman Imperial period, Mediterranean port cities were not only transit hubs - where ships, people and goods both departed and arrived - but also places of urban and cultural life developing away from the seafront.

They formed a real urban landscape with enough characteristics of complete cities whose aesthetic and monumental features were widely emphasised in iconography.

Although these highly codified images are not snapshots of reality, previous doctoral research assessed the documentary value of iconographic evidence for understanding Roman portscapes by inevitably confronting them with archaeological and textual data.

UrbaPort (Exploring the Urbanism of Roman Mediterranean Ports: from iconographic data to 3D reconstruction) is an interdisciplinary project that aims to understand the urban and architectural morphology of Roman maritime port cities and to propose reliable virtual reconstructions of these environments.

To achieve this goal, UrbaPort will propose an innovative reflection that will consider how iconographic evidence could be integrated to the digital tools for expanding the scientific value of historical restitutions in order to replace maritime activities in their architectural context.

UrbaPort will bring together an unprecedented combination of advanced computational methods – 3D modelling and smart generative methods – developed by the CNRS/MC MAP-Aria laboratory (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon) with the recent archaeological data conducted at Portus – the port of the Imperial Rome – by the Ecole française de Rome in the perspective of a virtual exhibition at the Archaeological Park of Ostia antica.