The Father of Architecture

AN ANCIENT BASILICA DISCOVERED beneath the Italian city of Fano has been labeled “a sensational finding” by Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli, “something that our grandchildren will be talking about."

- —Michael Natale

After all, it was designed by the man hailed as the “father of architecture.”

In the ninth book of his De Architectura treatise, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio laments the manner in which the Roman people seem to take their innovators for granted.

Vitruvius, as his name is often shortened, argues that the honors often imparted to athletes should be bestowed on writers, “for the wrestler, by training, merely hardens his own body for the conflict; a writer, however, not only cultivates his own mind, but affords every one else the same opportunity, by laying down precepts for acquiring knowledge, and exciting the talents of his reader.”