Part Three: Text and Context

t was drizzling in piazza Bologna when Romolo Martemucci rolled up on his motorbike, and some of the students were still shaking off sleep. The morning clouds made a welcome break in the July heat.

Martemucci, an associate professor of architecture at Penn State, is a native Roman. For the past 12 years he has run Sede di Roma, a small center in the majestic Palazzo Doria Pamphili (near the Pantheon) where all Penn State architecture and landscape architecture students spend at least a semester.

Over the last six weeks, Martemucci had been giving walking tours to Claudia Probart's nutrition students, tracing a route through 2000 years of Roman architecture. This morning's starting point, from the looks of the surrounding buildings, was going to be the modern era.

"Today's topic is context," Martemucci began. "Background. The thing against which the text is read."

Understanding context, he said, "in architecture and in life in general," is essential to the making of meaning—at least as important as being able to read the text itself. In architecture, in particular, "You measure the effective meaning of a building by first establishing its context."

The problem that faced Romans of the early Renaissance, Martemucci said, as they unearthed the piles of rubble that had once been ancient Rome, was the problem of text without context. What were they to make of all these fragments? How did these pieces fit together? "This is the archeologist's business: to find (or invent) a context that makes sense."

ere in piazza Bologna, the challenge is almost the opposite. This text—a modernist post office, designed by the architect Mario Ridolfi in 1934—exists within multiple contexts at once: that of its immediate vicinity, the buildings that surround it, the piazza it faces; but also that of the city of Rome, and beyond, that of all Italy. "We could even try to understand it in reference to all of Italian culture, back to the Etruscans and Magna Graecia."

Set against its immediate context, the building doesn't seem to fit in, the students noticed. It doesn't look much like the dowdy 19th-century fronts that face it. But considered as a part of Rome, it makes more sense. Its sculpted, bow-like shape becomes an echo of a curvilinear, Baroque city, a place where, Martemucci said, "There are very few straight lines. Even the large Roman forms are curves-great vaults and arches."

These soft forms are the major reference points for Ridolfi's design, Martemucci suggested. But there's more at work. The deceptively plain façade—of pale Travertine brick—and the general lack of adornment reflect the Rationalism of Ridolfi's own era, which, Martemucci said, "attempted to distill architecture away from ornament." The building doesn't mimic the Roman Baroque, in other words; it re-inteprets it. But the awareness of context is what anchors it in place. "Without that anchor it would be floating in isolation."

So what does all this have to do with food? In the case of nutrition and the Mediterranean diet, Probart and Martemucci argue, understanding the text requires understanding the contexts that give it meaning: the culture and the psychology and, yes, the architecture of Italy.