THE CITY THAT RESONATES

Acoustics, music and sound in the architecture of Rome

Rome is a city of layered sounds — bells, fountains, traffic, medieval echoes in the naves. But it is also, less visibly, a city of conscious acoustics: two thousand years of spaces built with thought for how sound would behave within them. This itinerary traces in six stops the places where sound was a political, theological and scientific problem before it was an aesthetic one. From the Theatre of Marcellus — acoustically effective without any acoustic theory — to the Oratorio del Gonfalone, where the Counter-Reformation used polyphony as a tool of persuasion; from the Basilica of Santa Cecilia, patron of musicians for five centuries, to Renzo Piano's Auditorium, designed with simulation software as a Roman engineer calculated the vault of an aqueduct: each stop offers a different answer to the same question — how does one build a space that makes people hear together.