Vitruvius’ basilica at fano: the drawings of a lost building From “de architectura libri decem”,

In his “De Architectura” libri decem book 5, I, VI, Vitruvius describes a Basilica designed by himself and erected at Fanum Fortunae, present-day Fano, a Roman colony standing at the Adriatic end of the via Flaminia. It is the sole building so far known to have been designed and constructed by the author of the famous treatise. It is an extraordinary building, especially so in that it constitutes a turning point in the design of basilicas. Today nothing is left of it and research has been going on for some years at our Department to understand and recreate this building and protect its precarious and ephemeral memory. The part of the research addressed herein regards a complex cataloguing effort (of hundreds of editions of “De Architectura” published in the world) and a critical analysis of the drawings which ever since 1522 have attempted to depict it based on the sole text, the original drawings never having been found. An ad hoc hypertextual data-base has been set up employing a widely used software (File Maker V.5). This work has three main objectives with reference to the drawings and the information archived in the data-base: 1. cataloguing; 2. interpretative association with the individual texts from which they derive; 3. critical consultation. In relation to the possible uses of the content of the data-base, however, at least five important applications directly connected with this work can be envisaged: 1. Critical consultation of the archives; 2. Support to models of reconstruction of the Basilica; 3. Epistemological investigation of the reference cultural models contemporary to the drawings; 4. Comparison and verification of the points of congruence with, and of the references to, extant ruins of Roman basilicas; 5. Publication and diffusion on the Web; We have collected more than 500 editions, translations and epitomes of “De Architectura” (including later editions of the original) published in various countries. Many of them are unknown to the main European libraries, of others very few copies survive, and those commonly held by Italian libraries (and in most European ones) are no more than 60-70. Not all are illustrated and many use drawings and diagrams already published in previous editions. Thirty-five original drawings connected with approximately 150 editions of “De Architectura” have been entered in the data-base.