Inside the Tabularium, the Roman Record Office the Museum Was Built On

Rome ran on documents. Laws, treaties, senatorial decrees and deeds had to exist somewhere physical, and from 78 BC that somewhere was a building on the Capitoline, put up by Quintus Lutatius Catulus, part of the rebuilding that followed a fire on the hill.

The records were not paper. Public acts were inscribed on bronze tablets, which is where the building's name comes from, and storing them meant floors strong enough to carry a great deal of metal. the engineering that held them up above a steep hillside.

Those upper floors are the part that did not survive. What is left is the base, which turned out to be far harder to get rid of than the offices it was built to support. The trapezoidal footprint follows the contour of the hill rather than a drawing board, and the cellars inside it do the terracing that made a level archive floor possible at all on a slope this steep.

By the Middle Ages the building had stopped being an archive and become a stronghold. The arches of the gallery were walled up to turn the structure into a fort, and the Palazzo Senatorio went up on the old upper storeys, which is why Rome's city hall still stands on a Republican foundation today.

That reuse is why any of it is here. A Roman public building left alone on a hill in the centre of the city would have been quarried for its stone within a few generations. Being useful kept it standing, first as a fortress and then as the base of somebody else's palace.

Only some arches have been reopened. Enough have to make the gallery readable as the covered walkway it once was, and to let the view back in. The vault they once carried is gone, along with the gabine stone columns and the travertine capitals that held it, so what remains reads as bare structure rather than as finished architecture.