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Remains of only building by Vitruvius found after centuries of searching
The remains of a basilica designed by immensely influential architect Vitruvius in the 1st century B.C. have been discovered in Fano, Italy. The only building known to have been designed by Vitruvius himself was found under Piazza Andrea Costa in a preventative archaeology excavation before redevelopment. Unlike the ancient public building found in 2023 which was speculated to be the long-sought basilica, the newly-discovered structure matches the detailed description in Vitruvius’ De Architectura.
The accuracy with which the remains found coincided with Vitruvian descriptions left experts astonished. Indeed, Vitruvius had described a building with a rectangular plan and a specific arrangement of columns: eight on the long side and four on the short side, with the omission of two columns at the point of facing the forum. Surveys conducted in the field showed a very precise correspondence with these data, and confirmed the gigantic proportions of the work, which included columns about five feet in diameter and an overall height approaching fifteen feet.
The crucial moment in the research was marked by what archaeologists called the litmus test. Through a targeted survey in Piazza degli Avveduti, carried out following the planimetric projections deduced from the treatise, the fifth corner column was found exactly where it was planned. This element, equipped with pillars on two sides to support the upper floor, provided definitive confirmation of the architectural layout. In addition to the column bases, the excavations uncovered a Roman-era perimeter wall still provided with plaster and the preparation levels of the floor layer, although the original flooring was lost due to the urban transformations that took place in subsequent centuries, such as the construction of medieval and modern buildings.
The Roman city of Fanum Fortunae, originally a settlement of the Piceni people in the Marches region of central Italy, was named after a temple dedicated to the goddess Fortuna believed to have been built after the Roman victory over the Carthaginian army of Hasdrubal (Hannibal’s brother) at the Battle of the Metaurus River in 207 B.C. The town grew around the temple and prospered thanks to the construction of the Via Flaminia, inaugurated in 220 B.C., that connected Rome directly to the Adriatic.
Its name first appears on the historical record in Julius Caesar’s De Bello Civili in 49 B.C. When Caesar infamously let the dice fly and crossed the Rubicon, he garrisoned Fanum with his legions. Augustus refounded and renamed it as a veteran’s colony (Colonia Julia Fanestris), building new defensive walls, a monumental city gate (most of which remains standing) and greatly expanding it following the Roman grid plan of urban design. That grid is still evident in the city’s layout today.
Before he wrote the seminal treatise De Architectura, the most influential text in western architectural history, Vitruvius served as a military engineer in Julius Caesar’s army, specializing in war machines. It’s not clear where he served, but from what he implies about his travels and about major sieges of Gallic oppida (fortified towns) in De Architectura, he fought in Gallic Wars but did not cross the Rubicon with Caesar.
When his soldiering days were over, he turned to civilian architecture and in around 19 B.C. he built the basilica of Colonia Julia Fanestris next to its forum. We know he designed it because he said so in De Architectura. The treatise covers principles of architecture, Greco-Roman construction norms and ideals uses examples of buildings he and his readers were familiar with, but the Fano basilica is the only building he writes about having designed and built himself.
After describing the design of a Roman forum in the first paragraphs of Book V, Vitruvius turns to basilicas which should be built adjacent to the forum. He lists the proportions and design of the norm for basilicas, then brings up his own as an example of a different but equally ideal version.
6. But basilicas of the greatest dignity and beauty may also be constructed in the style of that one which I erected, and the building of which I superintended at Fano. Its proportions and symmetrical relations were established as follows. In the middle, the main roof between the columns is 120 feet long and sixty feet wide. Its aisle round the space beneath the main roof and between the walls and the columns is twenty feet broad. The columns, of unbroken height, measuring with their capitals fifty feet, and being each five feet thick, have behind them pilasters, twenty feet high, two and one half feet broad, and one and one half feet thick, which support the beams on which is carried the upper flooring of the aisles. Above them are other pilasters, eighteen feet high, two feet broad, and a foot thick, which carry the beams supporting the principal raftering and the roof of the aisles, which is brought down lower than the main roof.
7. The spaces remaining between the beams supported by the pilasters and the columns, are left for windows between the intercolumniations. The columns are: on the breadth of the main roof at each end, four, including the corner columns at right and left; on the long side which is next to the forum, eight, including the same corner columns; on the other side, six, including the corner columns. This is because the[136] two middle columns on that side are omitted, in order not to obstruct the view of the pronaos of the temple of Augustus (which is built at the middle of the side wall of the basilica, facing the middle of the forum and the temple of Jupiter) and also the tribunal which is in the former temple, shaped as a hemicycle whose curvature is less than a semicircle.
8. The open side of this hemicycle is forty-six feet along the front, and its curvature inwards is fifteen feet, so that those who are standing before the magistrates may not be in the way of the business men in the basilica. Round about, above the columns, are placed the architraves, consisting of three two-foot timbers fastened together. These return from the columns which stand third on the inner side to the antae which project from the pronaos, and which touch the edges of the hemicycle at right and left.
9. Above the architraves and regularly dispersed on supports directly over the capitals, piers are placed, three feet high and four feet broad each way. Above them is placed the projecting cornice round about, made of two two-foot timbers. The tie-beams and struts, being placed above them, and directly over the shafts of the columns and the antae and walls of the pronaos, hold up one gable roof along the entire basilica, and another from the middle of it, over the pronaos of the temple.
10. Thus the gable tops run in two directions, like the letter T, and give a beautiful effect to the outside and inside of the main roof. Further, by the omission of an ornamental entablature and of a line of screens and a second tier of columns, troublesome labour is saved and the total cost greatly diminished. On the other hand, the carrying of the columns themselves in unbroken height directly up to the beams that support the main roof, seems to add an air of sumptuousness and dignity to the work.
In the early Imperial era, Fano became the largest city on the Adriatic coast of Italy. It continued to exist as Roman city despite incursions from Germanic tribes and the collapse of the Western Empire until the 6th century when it was destroyed by the forces of Ostrogothic King of Italy Vitiges during the war waged by Byzantine general Belisarius to reconquer Italy. The Byzantines rebuilt it and made it the capital of the Adriatic Pentapolis, but Vitruvius’ basilica “of greatest dignity and beauty” was gone for good.
Vitruvius originally included drawings of his work next to the description, but no illustrations from De Architectura have survived. Since the rediscovery and publication of Vitruvius’ treatise in the 15th century, scholars, artists and architects, Andrea Palladio and Raphael among them, have attempted to reconstruct the design of the Fano Basilica. Even with all the precise detail in the description, people have been arguing about it, sketching it, modelling it, recreating it and looking for any morsels of it for 500 years.
Now that the basilica has been found, the first priority of city and heritage officials is to protect the remains from the elements without completely shutting down the busy area around the downtown square. They also need funding, of course, and lots of it, for the immediate needs of the site and for what will be years of study and further excavation.
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