- ROME -- Imagine ancient Rome
before its fall: The some 1,350 fountains still trickle with water, the
1,790 palaces haven't fallen to ruins and the 240 public latrines are still
in business.
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- In painstaking detail, French comic book artist Gilles
Chaillet has brought the ancient city back to life with an immense map
based on a lifetime of research and a touch of artistic license.
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- Chaillet dreamed up the project when he was 9 years old.
Nearly 50 years later, he came to the Eternal City to show it off to the
Romans.
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- "This was an idea I could never get out of my head,"
Chaillet told The Associated Press on Thursday. "It was a bit of an
obsession."
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- There are no definitive surviving maps of ancient Rome,
which was most of the challenge, he said.
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- Chaillet's immense map is colored in with cheerful greens,
russets and pearly tones by his wife, Chantal. Looking at it, you can imagine
a day's stroll in Rome circa 314 A.D.: a leisurely morning at the bathhouses,
a stop at the market to buy some chickpeas and trip to the Circus Maximus
to take in a chariot race.
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- When Chaillet was a child in Paris, he discovered the
ruins of Rome through a postcard and comic books. Inspiration struck.
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- "I announced to my parents, 'I want to re-create
ancient Rome,'" he said. "They said, 'calm down and go do your
math homework.'"
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- At one point, Chaillet's father was so frustrated by
his son's lack of attention to his schoolwork that he set fire to some
early Rome sketches.
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- Chaillet, now 58, made other Rome maps at age 13 and
at 20, during his military service. After high school, he became a successful
comic book artist in a country where everyone from kindergartners to executives
read them.
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- In his downtime, Chaillet visited archives, libraries
and museums to research his side project.
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- He set his map in 314 A.D. because the majestic and well-preserved
Arch of Constantine wasn't built until around then, and he felt most Rome-lovers
couldn't imagine the city without it.
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- At that time, Rome had about 1 million inhabitants and
was ruled by Constantine I, who legalized Christianity.
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- When Chaillet finally sat down to sketch the 11 foot-by-6.5
foot map, he spent 5,000 hours at the drawing board. His wife spent another
3,000 hours coloring it in.
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- Chaillet thinks that about 5 percent of the map's 13,000
buildings are completely accurate. About 30 percent are fairly accurate,
and the rest is based on educated guesses, he said.
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- The map has been displayed in museums around France,
and in April Chaillet published a 200-page French-language book to accompany
the project, "Inside the Rome of the Cesars."
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- Now, his sketches and a smaller copy of the map are on
display at the French cultural center in the city that inspired his dreams.
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- "It's the end of a long quest" - and probably
the end of his career as a mapmaker, Chaillet said.
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- "There are other cities I also love, like Venice
and my hometown, Paris," he said. "But there's not the same emotion
there. ... I'd need a second life to do a second city."
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- http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apeurope_
story.asp?category=1103&slug=Mapping%20Rome
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