The Navona Lake and the Eels of the Pantheon. Architecture and landscape for flooding

Tiber is much more than the watercourse between its two banks: it is a much greater depth, encompassing entire parts of Rome. To understand the real extension of the Tiber, one should consider the hydro-geological map, where the lightest tones represent the valleys, made of silty sediments, accumulated over thousands of years, thanks to the presence of water. This imprint corresponds to the hydrological network of Rome, and it represents the actual thickness of the Tiber and its tributaries. If we mapped the ensemble of buildings, roads, gardens, monuments, any kind of infrastructure and construction that insist on that area, the result would be a portrait of what can be said the river-city of Rome, a crasis between two worlds − the river and the city − that we usually tend to separate. Finally, we could say that Rome is not a city on the Tiber but a city in the Tiber. Yet, floods have been part of Rome’s history for over 2600 years. In ancient times, floods were not considered eliminable: the ‘intemperance’ of the river had to be lived with and floods were seen as a phenomenon to adapt-to rather than fought-against. We could look at this story to think our contemporary cities, obsessed as we are by control and predictability, safety, and efficiency, sedated by the analgesic categories with which we have learned to describe the world we like, well-ordered, disciplined, and therefore static, without surprises, because transformation, transition, and change are concepts about which we find ourselves unprepared. We have no choice but to learn from the rivers, which know well that they do not exist.