The voices are there, across two millennia, but they are hard to hear. The songs of actors, grunts of bakers, laments of mourners; laborers shouting over the lime kilns and nuns whispering to the wards in their cloistered conservatory for at-risk girls; the bray of a donkey; clamor from the communist coffee bar and from the student archaeologists digging much of it up. 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 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, among other things, the Crypta Balbi Museum.
Balbus represents the quintessential Roman, and the record of other important figures of Italian history (St. Ignatius, Caravaggio, Aldo Moro) are lodged on the Crypta Balbi block. This play will not forget them. But its focus is on the more ephemeral, largely forgotten stories that unfolded there, and on the web of 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, animals too.
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 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. Your gift is essential, and is warmly appreciated.