Belissimo! I went to Rome a couple years ago and this adds a lot to understand what I saw.
But there's one thing I'd love to see: the filth and life. I want to see horse manure and mud on the streets, urine and faeces pouring from houses, the immense slums that would surround the city but left so few archaeological remains, graffiti on the walls, wear and tear on the streets (like what you can see in Pompei), the smoke from kitchens, pubs and bakeries, etc.
Not 1:1 recreations, but the Assasins Creed games scratch this itch. Im not a big video-gamer, but do love history, so usually buy them when the price drops down to a couple bucks just cause its neat to spend a couple hours walking around the historical recreations.
AC really made my experience in Italy better —- I probably was more in awe of the buildings and paintings as I only interacted with them on the screen.
I did have the urge to climb up everything. Thankfully I didn’t try and then flip around and accidentally stab a passerby like I did hundreds of times in the game.
AC was sold in the Uffizi’s gift shop in Florence which was cool to see.
I know with Origins (the best of the games) they had an option to explore and not play the game.
Building upon this idea: UbiSoft could license a version of the engine stripped of its game features (e.g. combats & health, climbing of buildings) with the purpose of creating historical reconstructions. These would be open source projects supervised by historians; every single detail could be discussed and improved, and changes merged via pull requests. Maybe UbiSoft's interest in the deal would be the free usage of the generated contents in the next instalments of its game.
Sincere question: why do we assume people in the past were so filthy?
I'm sure there are notable examples of unhygienic cities or buildings (I've read about a few) but in general one suspects there may be a tendency to exaggerate the "uncivilized" nature of people from the past. Romans clearly put a lot of values in their baths, for example, which suggests a people who value cleanliness.
Uninformed on this, so interested to hear a perspective!
It’s often exaggerated (as you say, bathing was popular in the Roman world, and also in the medieval Islamic world and even in many parts of medieval Europe), but ultimately they did not have sanitation (as in sewers, etc) to the same extent we do, and they had beasts of burden.
That said, I’m not sure to what extent this applies to Ancient Rome (as in Republic to fall of western empire). They _did_ have sewers, with public toilets attached to them, and they probably didn’t have that many horses wandering the street, as the horse collar hadn’t been invented yet. Ancient Rome presumably wasn’t as bad as a large medieval city (which wouldn’t usually have had proper sewers), and things may even have gotten worse later on, because at a certain point bathing really did become a lot less common in much of Europe (due to weird medical beliefs and religious objection to public bathhouses).
Fire that destroyed part of the set happened a year after the show was cancelled. Fire was reported in August 2007, cancellation was announced in July 2006.
Came to the comments to say this. The details are beautiful but it looks more pristine than even the cleanest modern cities. Rome as it really was should include some weathering stains at the very bare minimum
But there's one thing I'd love to see: the filth and life. I want to see horse manure and mud on the streets, urine and faeces pouring from houses, the immense slums that would surround the city but left so few archaeological remains, graffiti on the walls, wear and tear on the streets (like what you can see in Pompei), the smoke from kitchens, pubs and bakeries, etc.