Literary Traces, Dreamlike Traces. The Ideal City and the Invention of Archaeology

The form of the ideal city in its fifteenth-century iteration fundamentally coincides with the construction of an archaeological city, wherein the idea of Antiquity is measured not against the truth of material traces, but against a literature of traces suspended between source material and imagination. Yet, albeit devoid of the physical and graphic reassurance of authentic vestiges, the dreamlike act linking data interpretation to the principle of verisimili-tude marks the very inception of the Western Classical narrative. This narrative matured within a refined society twelve hundred years later, where an extremely select milieu of intellectuals “trans-ported” the Greco-Roman Hellenistic experience into the present through the filter of the longue durée, rewriting its contents through new devices of formal processing aimed at constructing a new world – one endowed with a language that transfigured ancient grammar. Among these devices, the theatre constitutes the crucial interpretative mechanism of form (space) and life (action). Within it, representation becomes narration through a generative, dreamlike act. The backdrop-city against which the ideal impulse of the Renaissance con-tends – based on the literary traces of treatises and the always-allographic interpretation of an-cient sources – is the Gothic city. Here, the presence of ancient artefacts is legible primarily as a palimpsest: a superposition and co-presence of elements that allowed Antiquity to survive, on the one hand, by being infiltrated by the Modern (the long Middle Ages) and, simultaneously, by infiltrating the urban structures of the Modern itself. The relationship between the ideal city and the invention of traces is the subject of this essay, developed through a specific concept of Antiquity – understood not as a historical phase contained within a Delta T, but as the tem-poral extension of an archaeology of invention, which is nothing other than the archaeology of architects.