We inaugurate the section devoted to art history with a contribution which deals with an image of Rome in the Middle Ages, which therefore takes us back to SPOLIA's "logo" and place of birth.

Nicoletta Bernacchio, Una veduta di Roma nel XIII secolo dalla cripta della cattedrale di Anagni, "Archeologia Medievale" XXII, 1995, pp.519-529.

The scholar proposes a political-ideological reading of the view of the city of Gaza portrayed together with those of Azotum, Ascalon and Accaron - Philistine cities punished by God for having stolen the Ark of the Covenant with the Israelites (First Book of Samuel, 5-6) - in the XII vault of the crypt of Anagni cathedral (Lazio), frescoed during the Papacy of Gregory IX (1227-1241). She suggests that it is a partial view of Rome, in particular of the sector of the city controlled at the time by the Conti family, to which the Pontiff himself belonged; this topographical identification is based on the presence of a spiraliform column against the background of the turreted walls which the scholar recognises as the Trajan Column, while at the bottom there is a hill which might be the Quirinale, where the noble Roman family owned its turreted homes. The historical events that provide a backdrop for the decorative enterprise see the Pontiff and the Emperor Frederick II at the height of their fight, which justifies the choice of episodes of the Old Testament such as the indirect references to the supremacy of the temporal power of the Papacy over the imperial one.

The proposed reading, although providing interesting points for consideration, must be appraised with some caution both because of the absence of Roman monuments which represent more explicitly the City or the Conti family, as the honorary column is a topos in the representations of ancient cities during the Middle Ages - and not only of Rome -, and because an opposite reading of the image cannot be excluded, that is that the painter used known iconographic themes - and therefore Roman ones - to represent symbolically the biblical city that he could not know directly.

Simona Manacorda