Christopher Howard is communications manager for the American Academy in Rome.
In the mid-1930s, amidst the looming tensions of a Europe on the brink of war, a young architect from Jefferson, Georgia, set out to capture the essence of a city steeped in history and undergoing rapid transformation. Richard Winston Ayers, a Rome Prize Fellow with a recent MFA from Yale University, arrived in Naples on September 26, 1936, his camera in hand and an insatiable curiosity for the architectural wonders of Italy. Over the next twenty-one months, Ayers would photograph not just buildings, but the soul of a nation at a pivotal moment in history.
The recently launched Roma150 Portal has breathed new life into Ayers’s work, selecting seventy evocative images from the Ayers Collection, now preserved in the Photographic Archive of the American Academy in Rome. These photographs are part of a larger cache of 3,564 images, taken during Ayers’s fellowship between 1936 and 1938. They offer a rare glimpse into Rome’s urban landscape during the Fascist regime, documenting the era’s grand architectural ambitions and the everyday life of its people.
Ayers’s time in Italy was marked by extensive travels. From the rolling hills of Tuscany to the bustling streets of Alexandria, he journeyed far beyond the Aurelian Walls, exploring France, Germany, Sweden, Greece, Egypt, and Palestine. His Moto Guzzi—the motorcycle was his preferred method of transportation—carried him across Europe, and his photographs reveal an architect deeply engaged with the world, capturing moments that reflect both the grandeur and the subtleties of his surroundings.
The Ayers Collection was donated by his son, Richard Allan Ayers. The architect’s images document not only architecture and travels, but also day-to-day life at the Academy. Ayers participated in mandatory projects and interdisciplinary design competitions, and he turned his lens on friends and colleagues in informal settings; he also created strikingly moody portraits. [A sentence or two here about people in his photos—Knoll and others, neighborhood children in towns across Italy?] Subject matter from the collection includes captures of Egyptian hieroglyphs from Abydos, Gothic and Baroque cathedrals across Italy and Europe, the Acropolis in Athens, mosques in Jerusalem, ordinary people on the streets of Alexandria, and the Academy’s Cortile.
Now, through Roma150—a public history project coordinated by major Roman universities including Università Roma Tre, Sapienza Università di Roma, and Università di Roma Tor Vergata—Ayers’s work is placed in context, indeed a continuum, of the Eternal City’s changing landscape. As a digital archive illustrating Rome’s urban transformations over the past 150 years, Roma150 brings together photographs, maps, videos, newspapers, and other archival documents to tell the stories of the places and people who have shaped the Eternal City. The project emphasizes lesser-known collections, like the Ayers Collection, organizing them into themes that highlight Rome’s social, cultural, and architectural evolution. Institutiuonal contributors of images to Roma150 include Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Archivio di Stato di Roma, Rai Teche, and Società Geografica Italiana.
The Roma150 Portal, developed by Risviel, a company that helps scholars and cultural organizations to produce WebGis and document management system sites, offers an interactive experience for users, with materials geolocated and accessible through WebGis. This digital tool allows visitors to explore the city’s history through thematic itineraries, each enriched with fact sheets that provide historical context and insights into the sources used. For those eager to delve deeper, the site’s map section serves as the gateway to a treasure trove of multimedia material. (Reader beware—the text at Roma150 is only in Italian.)
Ayers’s legacy extends beyond his fellowship years. After World War II, he returned to the architectural firm of Buckler & Fenhagen, where he eventually became a principal. His influence continues today through the successor firm, Ayers Saint Gross, known for its commitment to design excellence. As a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a member of the National Academy of Design, Ayers left an indelible mark on the architectural landscape, particularly in Maryland, where his work can still be seen on the grounds of Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Historical Society.
The Roma150 project, and the ongoing collaboration between Richard Allan Ayers and the Academy’s Photographic Archives, ensures that the architect’s vision will be preserved and appreciated by future generations. As visitors to the portal explore the curated collections, they are invited to see Rome through Ayers’s eyes—a city where history and modernity coexist in a delicate balance, captured forever in the grain of a photograph.