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.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home