Roma… Rom… Rome. The Eternal City is known by many names, yet none of them conjure the same image. Although I was born and raised in Rome, my memories and understanding of the city—like those of anyone else—are shaped and altered by narratives that are not my own. Our knowledge of Rome is continually enhanced, modified, corrupted, and distorted by the countless representations produced by scholars, artists, tourists, and amateurs alike. The image of Rome that circulates today is constructed through layers of clichés, fictional characters, mass-media portrayals, and endlessly repeated tourist snapshots.

The images used in this video were appropriated from the Internet. While I can contextualize each image and recognize the places and monuments depicted, they do not correspond to my lived experience of the city. They are, instead, the memories of others. These “artificial” memories coexist and compete with my own recollections, generating a hybrid place—one that I sometimes miss more acutely than the Rome of my past.

The visual distortions and degradations in the video were produced by re-photographing the images directly from a computer screen, emphasizing their mediated and unstable nature. The sound was sourced from multiple Italian television programs and layered into a fragmented, overlapping commentary that mirrors the visual dissonance. The resulting video forms a cacophony of distorted images and abrasive sounds that poetically reflecs my understanding of Rome as a city shaped by memory, mediation, and loss. Whether this Rome appears dystopian or idyllic remains unresolved and is left to the viewer to determine.