The Jewish Ghetto of Rome. Tools and methods for knowledge the demolished urban fabrics.

In 1555 Pope Paul IV segregated the Jewish community of Rome, building a walled enclo-sure within the Sant'Angelo district, along the river Tiber. Despite rare exceptions, the situ-ation remained unchanged until 1848 when Pope Pius IX ordered the removal of the wall and isolation was temporarily abolished. Immediately after the Italian unification, when Rome was declared capital, the demolition of the Ghetto was decided: the dense building fabric - maybe unsanitary - was razed to the ground between 1885 and 1888 replaced with larger building blocks. The historical formative process that characterizes this piece of town differs from the urban history of the whole historic center of Rome. Forced to grow within the walls, the building fabric of the Ghetto developed atypically: it preserved archa-ic architectural and urban features and, due to the expansion limitation, it developed in an introverted multi-layered way. Because of these unique features, the urban fabric of the Rome Ghetto has been the object of many specific multidisciplinary research and studies. The research we present aims to contribute to the studies by providing additional tools for the knowledge of this lost portion of urban fabric using two specific sources. The first is the plan of Rome made by Leonardo Bufalini in 1551: redesigning this map on the 19th century cadastral base allows us to visualize the urban consistency just before the enclo-sure. The second source dates to the middle of the 19th century and consist of the built heritage survey drawn to make the commemorative model of the French siege of Rome in 1849. The analytical reading of these documents, together with their graphic reinterpreta-tion, helps us understand the urban structure of the Ghetto in two fundamental stages of the evolutionary process and to speculate about the related phenomena.