Allison Emmerson
Pestilence, Paupers, and Puticuli: Reconsidering Rome’s Esquiline Suburb

Nineteenth-century excavations on the Esquiline Hill uncovered something truly shocking: puticuli, mass graves filled with the remains of Republican Rome’s poorest residents, who had been tossed out like garbage to pollute the suburb immediately outside the city walls. In the past century and a half, the idea of mass graves on the Esquiline has become canonical. This talk problematizes and reinterprets the finds, encouraging new understandings of Roman urbanism and infrastructure in the Republican period.

Allison Emmerson is the Emeline Hill Richardson Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies and assistant professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Michael Saltarella
Deviant Landscapes: Irregularity and the Formal Garden

The emotional resonance of gardens such as Bomarzo is uncanny, transcending genre and time, and reaching us on an intuitive level. Sinister monsters loom over the valley seemingly set on the destruction of order, a clear deviation from the rigid formality of the Renaissance garden. Today landscapes are supposed to “function” and “perform,” and there is not much talk of monsters or emotions. This talk will investigate the subtle and not so subtle irregularities in formal gardens throughout Italy, and how these irregularities can contribute to the emotional complexity and overall experience of the landscape.

Michael Saltarella is the Prince Charitable Trusts/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture and an associate at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The shoptalks will be held in English. Watch Allison Emmerson’s shoptalk live at https://livestream.com/aarome.