Rome Reborn

Rome Reborn is a long-running digital reconstruction of the city of ancient Rome as it may have appeared in 320 CE, directed by the classicist Bernard Frischer. The project was officially launched on 1 December 1996 at a conference at the American Academy in Rome, with its core team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); it later moved to the University of Virginia and Indiana University, and since 2018 it has been published by Frischer's company Flyover Zone. The model covers the whole city inside the Aurelian Walls, more than 7,000 buildings, and has passed through four major versions: 1.0 (2007), 2.0 (2008), 3.0 (2018) and 4.0 (2023).

Rome Reborn is a virtual heritage project; its developers described it in 2009 as "one of the largest scholarly virtual reconstructions made to date". Its earlier versions were shown on stereo projection screens and, in 2008, as a free 3D layer in Google Earth. Since 2018 the model has been sold as guided tours for personal computers and VR headsets, first for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Oculus Go and Samsung Gear VR, and later through Flyover Zone's Unity-based Yorescape platform, which also runs on Meta Quest headsets and smartphones. The project has also been used for research, such as viewshed and astronomical alignment studies and crowd simulation.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Checked dates, versions, figures, quotes and attributions against the 2025 status report, the 2007-2009 project papers, archived project pages and the cited news reports. About review dates.

Scope and sources of the model

The project's original aim was a set of 3D models showing the urban development of Rome from the first settlement in the late Bronze Age (about 1000 BCE) to the depopulation of the city in the early Middle Ages (about 550 CE). On the advice of its scientific advisory committee, the team started with 320 CE. Frischer and Mohamed Abdelaziz give the reasons in a 2025 status report: the city's population had reached its peak, major Christian churches were just beginning to be built, no new civic buildings were built after that date, and the fourth-century city is the best attested phase in the archaeological record. The same report says there are no plans to extend the model back in time. Speaking to AFP at the 2018 launch, Frischer said, "We chose AD 320 because we have the most information for that period so we can be as accurate as possible".

The team divides the city into two classes of elements:

Class	Definition	Number	Main sources
Class I	Features whose exact location, phasing, design, function and name are well documented, such as the terrain, the Tiber, the Colosseum and the Pantheon	About 250	Archaeological studies and reference works on Roman topography, including the Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae and The Atlas of Ancient Rome
Class II	All other urban features, mostly ordinary buildings such as houses, apartment blocks and warehouses whose individual design is unknown	About 6,750	The two late-antique "regionary catalogues", which list the building stock of each of the city's 14 regions

Frischer and Abdelaziz write that following the regionary catalogues makes the model "quantitatively accurate" but, apart from the Class I elements, it "cannot be accurate in detail". Subsurface features such as aqueducts and sewers were not modeled. Writing in Hyperallergic in 2019, the historian Sarah Bond noted that firm archaeological evidence exists for only about 265 buildings and monuments of the period, so the model still contains a significant amount of educated conjecture.

The project says it follows the London Charter on computer-based visualization of cultural heritage and, since their ratification by ICOMOS in 2017, the Seville Principles of virtual archaeology.

History

Origins

Frischer told AFP that he first had the idea in 1974, when "the technology didn't exist". He presented the concept, then called "Project Cicero", at a conference hosted by Apple Computer on 19-20 June 1986, and published it in 1988 as part of a proposed multimedia "Classics Expert System". The plan included an explorable imaginary world for students based on Italo Gismondi's physical model of ancient Rome. The project was officially launched on 1 December 1996. The core team at UCLA expected to finish within five to ten years. The project website later said the initiative had been launched by the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory, and Frischer listed that laboratory's Digital Roman Forum Project among the open-access versions of Rome Reborn. Architectural historian Diane Favro and 3D modeler Dean Abernathy contributed to the early development.

Scanning the Plastico

Most of the ordinary buildings were based on the Plastico di Roma Antica, the 1:250 plaster model of Constantinian Rome built under Gismondi's direction (from 1936 to 1974, according to Guidi and colleagues) and kept at the Museo della Civiltà Romana. A team at the Politecnico di Milano led by Gabriele Guidi digitized it. The model measures 16 by 17.5 m but contains houses only about 2 cm tall, so the team used a frequency-modulated continuous-wave laser radar together with other survey methods. The raw result was a mesh of 260 million polygons. Rather than use that mesh directly, the team studied it for repeated shapes and identified about twenty base building types. These archetypes were rebuilt as a library in Autodesk Maya and placed on the scanned terrain. Some repetitive elements, including city walls, temples, aqueducts and Tiber bridges, were generated procedurally with Houdini. Guidi described the result to Smithsonian as "a meta-model, a model of a model". The scanning was also described in a paper at the SPIE Videometrics VIII conference in 2005.

The project moved to the University of Virginia in 2004, where it was based at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), which Frischer directed. The Politecnico di Milano became a partner the same year.

Version 1.0 (2007)

Rome Reborn 1.0 was presented on 11 June 2007 at a press conference in Rome's city hall on the Capitoline Hill, presided over by the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. The model had about 9 million polygons. Frischer called it "a true 3-D big screen stereo projection" and "a real-time model for immersive theaters". According to Smithsonian, more than 100 people from Italy, the United States, Germany and Britain had worked on it. The team at the time planned to publish the model online as a kind of peer-reviewed journal that scholars could add to over time. The ownership notice on the later project website states that version 1.0 is owned by the Regents of the University of California.

Version 2.0 and Google Earth (2008)

Rome Reborn 2.0 (alpha) was first shown on 11 August 2008 at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. The project website later said it was the featured project of SIGGRAPH 2008, shown in a 110 by 30 foot booth at the entrance to the Los Angeles Convention Center. Version 2.0 rebuilt the Class II buildings with grammar-based procedural modeling in CityEngine, software from Procedural Inc. of Zurich. Rule sets written in the CGA shape grammar, designed with archaeological consultants Claudia Angelelli and Frischer, turned massing models derived from the Plastico scan into detailed houses, apartment blocks and temples. The temple rule set alone had almost one hundred attributes for Ionic and Corinthian designs. In 2009 the authors reported that the model had grown to more than 400 million polygons and was undergoing archaeological review that was expected to take at least twelve months.

On 12 November 2008 Google added an "Ancient Rome 3D" layer to Google Earth, produced by IATH from the Rome Reborn model. It contained more than 6,700 3D buildings and 250 placemarks, and Google said it was the first time it had incorporated an ancient city in Google Earth. Because the ancient terrain differed from today's, Google displayed the model as a simple overlay. Google also ran an Ancient Rome 3D curriculum competition for K-12 teachers in the United States around the layer. By 2019 the layer was no longer available directly in Google Earth.

Later versions 2.1 (2010) and 2.2 (2012) followed. Fly-through videos made with version 2.2 were used by the art history site Smarthistory.

Version 3.0 and the move to VR (2018)

Version 3.0 was developed from 2008 onward. The project website calls it "entirely new in terms of technology and content" and says it was built with private funding. The work moved with Frischer to Indiana University, where he was a professor of informatics. In 2025 Frischer and Abdelaziz wrote that the project had tried to solve the long-term sustainability problem of digital models (supported by a National Science Foundation grant) and concluded that publishing through an academic press was the best route. When no American university publisher would take it on, the team founded its own employee-owned publishing company, Flyover Zone.

Flyover Zone Productions launched Rome Reborn 3.0 at a press conference at Rome's Foreign Press Association on 21 November 2018. Smithsonian described a model of 7,000 buildings and monuments over a 5.5 square mile area, built by a team of 50 academics and computer experts over 22 years. AFP reported the total cost as US$3 million over 22 years.

Version 4.0 and Yorescape (2023-present)

Flyover Zone released Rome Reborn 4.0, a remastered edition of its aerial tour "Flight Over Ancient Rome", in November 2023. ANSA reported that it used updated graphics, time warps and 3D models to show the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Basilica of Maxentius, the imperial palaces and the temples and monuments on the Capitoline Hill as they looked in 320 AD. It was offered in English as an app and online through Flyover Zone's virtual tour service, which then had 14 other tours. Frischer told ANSA, "Our aim is not to replace real tourism, but to improve it."

That service, Yorescape, was programmed in Unity and brought to market in 2023. According to Frischer and Abdelaziz, it publishes the model as virtual tours (for example of the Baths of Caracalla, the Colosseum district, the Pantheon, the Roman Forum and a flight over the whole city) on iOS and Android devices, Mac and Windows computers, and VR headsets such as Quest and Vive. Because it runs on smartphones, visitors can also use it as an augmented reality app at the real sites. As of 1 May 2025 Yorescape had 16 tours, including heritage sites in Egypt, Greece, Italy, Lebanon and Mexico, and more than 30 academic institutions had bought subscriptions, among them UC Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. In 2024 Frischer was described as Flyover Zone's founder and CEO.

In 2025 the authors said that the 320 CE model was close to completion. Flyover Zone plans to add more Class I monuments, update the model as new discoveries are made, release a free online database documenting the evidence and decisions behind each major element, and publish a final report through an academic press.

VR and AR applications

Version	Year	Main presentation form
1.0	2007	Real-time model for stereo projection in immersive theaters
2.0	2008	Shown at SIGGRAPH 2008; Ancient Rome 3D layer in Google Earth
2.1 / 2.2	2010 / 2012	Fly-through videos
3.0	2018	Paid tour apps for Windows and Mac computers and the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Oculus Go and Samsung Gear VR
4.0	2023	Yorescape platform for mobile devices, computers and VR headsets

The 2018 release had three VR modules: "Flight Over Ancient Rome", "The Roman Forum" and "The Basilica of Maxentius", with 2D versions for computers. In 2019 the team worked with Unity, 3ds Max and the photogrammetry software Reality Capture. The flight is an aerial highlights tour of about two hours with more than 35 points of interest. The two site tours let users walk freely through the reconstructed spaces with an in-app guide, and a "Time Warp" feature switches between the reconstruction and the present-day ruins. The project website said in 2019 that the apps ran on PCs (Mac, Windows 10) and on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and offered a free trial of the Roman Forum tour.

Frischer and Abdelaziz describe the tours as "Virtual Tourism 2.0": a guide performs a script written by a specialist on the monument, the site is shown mainly as it looked in antiquity, users can roam freely in a game engine and teleport between points of interest on a map, and an AI chatbot for questions is a stated aim. Frischer has said the project was meant to "bring Rome to the classroom, rather than bring the class to Rome", and after a 2024 lecture at Mount Holyoke College attendees tried the tour on Oculus headsets.

Research use

From the start the model was also meant as a research tool. Frischer uses the term "simpiricism" for the method: experts observe real-time computer simulations of past conditions alongside conventional evidence. The 2025 status report names viewshed studies of alignments between monuments, and between monuments and astronomical features, as the most productive use so far. Other methods it lists are 3D agent-based modeling and the recreation of religious experiences. In one example, Frischer used NASA's Horizons system with the model to study how the sun lined up with an Egyptian obelisk and the Ara Pacis, and concluded that the obelisk did not cast its shadow through the middle of the Ara Pacis altar on the emperor Augustus' birthday, contrary to a popular theory.

In a 2007 paper in the Journal of Cultural Heritage, Diego Gutierrez, Frischer and colleagues at the University of Zaragoza used an AI crowd simulation in a 3D model of the Colosseum to test the idea that the building moved spectators to and from their seats more slowly than earlier scholars believed, because of possible bottlenecks. The published study covered a quarter of the building; a simulation of the whole amphitheater with about 50,000 agents was listed as future work.

Credit and access debate

In February 2019 Sarah Bond wrote in Hyperallergic that some digital humanists had questioned whether it was ethical to profit personally from a project that had benefited from decades of public investment. She wrote that earlier versions had received government funding from bodies such as the NEH and NSF and had been developed at UCLA, the University of Virginia and Indiana University, and that the product website largely glossed over earlier contributors and public funding. She also quoted Ethan Gruber, who had worked on the project in 2007-2008, as saying he was "disappointed" that contributions made in good faith had been commercialized. At the time the Roman Forum VR tour cost US$6.99 on iTunes, and Frischer had promised to donate Oculus Go headsets to a number of universities and primary schools. The 2025 status report, by contrast, says that before it was restarted through a private company the project never succeeded in obtaining a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Frischer replied on the project website on 27 February 2019. He said earlier contributors had been thanked in the video of the 2018 launch, and he added that acknowledgement to the About page. He also said version 3.0 and its apps were the intellectual property of the company. He announced a free fly-through video of version 3.0 made with Smarthistory, published in May 2019, and noted that earlier versions had been released as free videos. The 2025 status report links to a list of contributors and discloses that its authors have an economic interest in Flyover Zone.

See also

• Virtual heritage
• Education
• Photogrammetry
• 3D scanning
• CAVE