The voices are there, across two millennia, but they are hard to hear. The songs of actors, grunts of bakers, and laments of mourners; the clamor of stoneworkers and the whispers of nuns to their wards inside a cloistered conservatory for at-risk girls; the bray of a donkey, and the chatter of student archaeologists who dug up their stories.
This tightly layered history of the Crypta Balbi block in central Rome is evident in ruins, artifacts, archives, and local lore. But it comes to life most powerfully through the words we find for it.
Giving voice to this place and its histories is the aim of an exciting collaboration between writer-curator-art historian Elizabeth Rodini; actor-playwright-theatrical producer Sista Bramini and actor-performer-musician Camilla dell'Agnola of Teatro Natura; and IUNO, a dynamic, Rome-based curatorial team.
Rodini’s new book, On the Street of the Hidden Shops: One City Block, Two Thousand Years, and a Walk Through the Layered Lives of Rome, is the starting point. In thick chapters and brief vignettes, it explores the multi-faceted lives that were lived out on the site of an ancient theater complex, named for the general Lucius Cornelius Balbus (13 BCE) and occupied today by the Crypta Balbi Museum.
Balbus represents the quintessential Roman, and this play will not forget him. But its focus is on the more ephemeral, largely forgotten stories that unfolded on atop his ruined theater, and life they wove. This urban landscape, as a layering of time, makes equal space for all and especially for the forgotten: women, children, laborers and pilgrims and the poor.
Together, Rodini and Bramini will write the script, which Teatro Natura will infuse with music, movement, and a simple but elegant staging in the remains of the Crypta Balbi. The museum preserves significant archaeological evidence of past lives, but it is often hard to read. This play will make the space legible and bring its history closer to the present. After a staged reading in New York City, public performances will be presented at the Crypta Balbi.
After 2,000 years, the time is right. Rodini’s book is out in November, 2026; Teatro Natura is excited to undertake new projects; and the Crypta Balbi Museum is gearing up to reopen in 2027 after a major renovation and reinstallation. Our collaboration is shaped and timed for success.
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