Watch Rome Rise, Fall, and Rise Again in a Three-Minute 3D Timelapse

Schol­ars dis­agree on when, exact­ly, Rome fell. But if you watch the new video from City 3D Time­lapse above, you’ll under­stand the lack of debate on the ques­tion of whether it fell. Around the turn of the sixth cen­tu­ry AD, build­ings start van­ish­ing at a rate that soon turns alarm­ing; long before the end of the first mil­len­ni­um, it’s clear that Rome has been plunged into very hard times indeed. In the video’s accel­er­at­ed visu­al his­to­ry, that much-scru­ti­nized 500-year span pass­es in a lit­tle more than five sec­onds. Just one minute lat­er, it has spread not just beyond the old city lim­its, but beyond the very frame of the aer­i­al view, becom­ing the vast urban­ized region we know today.

Leg­end has it that Rome was found­ed in 753 BC, when Romu­lus killed his twin broth­er Remus. As reflect­ed by the video, archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence sug­gests that the area was set­tled ear­li­er, though the tra­di­tion­al date of Rome’s found­ing rough­ly coin­cides with the emer­gence of what we know as the Roman King­dom.

There fol­low the Roman Repub­lic, the Roman Empire, the medieval era — when the once-for­mi­da­ble Eter­nal City was left prac­ti­cal­ly for dead  — the Renais­sance, the Roman Baroque peri­od, the indus­tri­al era, and final­ly, our time of glob­al­iza­tion. For ref­er­ence, the clas­si­cal archae­ol­o­gist Gio­van­ni Pirane­si went to Rome and drew his influ­en­tial etch­ings of its ruins around the 1:55 mark of this three-minute video.

Not that the Rome cap­tured in Pirane­si’s Vedute bears much resem­blance to the Rome of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, for bet­ter or for worse. You can still see the Colos­se­um by moon­light, but the ambi­ence won’t be the same: the over­growth has long since been scraped off, and the car­go shorts are out in force year-round. Regard­less, no city is best appre­ci­at­ed through its land­marks alone, not even the mod­ern Rome so long both cel­e­brat­ed and dis­missed as an open-air muse­um. Watch­ing it rise, fall, and rise again from above with­in the length of a Euro­vi­sion song reminds us that it was­n’t built, or rebuilt, in a day — and that, in the face of often-for­mi­da­ble dif­fi­cul­ties, it even now man­ages to put up some­thing new once in a while.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Rome Began: The His­to­ry As Told by Ancient His­to­ri­ans

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 CE: Explore Stun­ning Recre­ations of The Forum, Colos­se­um and Oth­er Mon­u­ments

The Chang­ing Land­scape of Ancient Rome: A Free Online Course from Sapien­za Uni­ver­si­ty of Rome

What Did Ancient Rome Look Like? A 3D Vir­tu­al Tour of the City Dur­ing the Sec­ond Cen­tu­ry AD

Time­lapse Ani­ma­tion Lets You See the Rise of Cities Across the Globe, from 3700 BC to 2000 AD

A 3D Ani­ma­tion Shows the Evo­lu­tion of New York City (1524 — 2023)

When the Colos­se­um in Rome Became the Home of Hun­dreds of Exot­ic Plant Species

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.