“Lost Identity” explores the Roman Forum as a contested site where architectural memory, historical layering, and acts of erasure have continuously reshaped its meaning across centuries. Through a series of large-scale, highly detailed drawings—created using cutting-edge laser scanning technology with an unprecedented one-millimetre accuracy—the exhibit reveals a Forum far more complex than the picturesque classical ideal presented today.

Stretching from the Colosseum to the Tabularium, these drawings represent the first comprehensive topographical sectional studies of the site, the product of fourteen years of dedicated work. They uncover the physical scars of history: structures, once integral to the Forum’s evolving identity, later erased to fabricate a purer narrative of Roman antiquity.

The exhibit juxtaposes Palladio’s Renaissance interpretations—documented in I quattro libri dell’architettura and RIBA archival sketches—with newly captured digital realities. Palladio’s drawings served both as a celebration of classical ideals and as tools that, perhaps inadvertently, contributed to a selective remembering of the past.

“Lost Identity” challenges visitors to confront the distortions created by centuries of representation, destruction, and reinterpretation. It asks: Whose antiquity are we preserving?