Virides Moenia

A high school in Rome (Liceo Classico) has conceived and launched a project entitled "Virides Moenia", which is about flora, arts and classical languages in relation to the Aurelian walls, from the name of the Emperor Aurelian (270-275 AD).
Aurelian, after nearly five centuries of Rome's unopposed domination, recognized the threat from Germanic tribes near the Empire borders, and in 271 AD he decided the city needed a defensive wall to protect it against possible invaders.
The Wall was originally nineteen kilometers long and about six to eight meters high (twenty feet). It had 3.5 meter thick walls. The wall included a square tower about every thirty meters, 381 in total. Also it featured eighteen grand gates, including the Porta Latina and Porta San Sebastiano, which were protected by semi-circular towers.
Virides Moenia intends studying and analyzing the flora along and inside the city walls, as an example of coexistence between complex plant species and varieties of different origin and provenance, and between them and a hystoric monument of global importance. This citizen science project is based on the use of the app INaturalist and, through the use of a smartphone or tablet, to document with photo observations, to make a GPS location and built a map of the vegetation.For each species of plant can be then associated considerations on etymological, literary, iconographic and scientific features. less ↑