Its creator has called it a “virtual time machine” — a digital reconstruction of ancient Rome that became available to Internet users around the world this week.
Users of Google Earth can now see the city, down to the last aqueduct and arena, as it looked at noon on April 1 320AD. They can navigate through the Forum, past the platform or rostra from which Cicero once declaimed, admire the statues, read the inscriptions, pry into palaces, and then slip round to the Colosseum or whisk over to the Circus Maximus where the ancient Romans held their chariot races.
There, the virtual traveler will find not the slightly disappointing, enormous oval expanse of grass that confronts the real tourist, but the huge, walled stadium that they are forced to conjure up from their imagination.
It is the “Rome of [the emperor] Constantine in which everything is new”, said Google Earth’s chief technologist, Michael Jones, at the presentation in Rome’s city hall. “It’s new. It’s modern. It’s beautiful.”
Some 6,700 digitally recreated structures have gone towards making up the latest “layer,” which can be superimposed on Google Earth’s images of the city. Ten of the buildings, including monuments such as the Colosseum, can be entered so users can marvel at the architecture and even gaze on details like marble floors,.
The first concerted effort to recreate the ancient imperial capital was made by Italian architect Italo Gismondi. Three years before his death in 1974 he finished a vast plaster model of ancient Rome in 1:250 scale now in the city’s Museo della Civilta Romana.
Gismondi’s research played an important role in the project, begun in 1997 by Bernard Frischer, a teacher at the University of Virginia (UVA). After 10 years of collaboration between UVA, the University of California, Los Angeles and Milan’s Politecnico, Rome Reborn — made up of 50 million polygons (the building blocks of 3D computer graphics) — was unveiled last year.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
PROBE: Last week, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against presidential candidate Calin Georgescu accusing him of supporting fascist groups Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Romania’s capital on Saturday in the latest anti-government demonstration by far-right groups after a top court canceled a presidential election in the EU country last year. Protesters converged in front of the government building in Bucharest, waving Romania’s tricolor flags and chanting slogans such as “down with the government” and “thieves.” Many expressed support for Calin Georgescu, who emerged as the frontrunner in December’s canceled election, and demanded they be resumed from the second round. George Simion, the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), which organized the protest,
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