Embodied Time in the Urban Artifacts of Rome

The educational value for students studying in an historical context resides in the temporal dimension of the architecture and urbanism. ‘Time,’ as commonly defined, is “a continuum which lacks spatial dimensions and in which events succeed one another from the past through the present to the future.” The temporal dimension of a physical entity like ‘the city’ implies that time, paradoxically, embodies physical form. If, in this context, ‘embodying’ is making the intangible tangible and perceptible, then “embodied time” is the representation of time within a spatial dimension, in this case, within the form of the city. Embodied time concretizes the history of the city within artifactual memory.