As the "Revolution" threatened Rome during the final decades of the Republic, the many landscapes of the city — built, intellectual, social and natural — became inextricably linked within a confused cultural matrix. Vitruvius was not simply observing a set of places; he was living within spaces that, while having lost many of their explicit meanings over time, contained within them implicit, albeit unclear, cultural codes for him to ponder. Vitruvius in fact was not describing Roman

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... as it was; he was describing it as he wished it to be. There are a host of reasons to question the physical exactitude of his examples and subsequent models: The vantage point of a single individual living within a specific place at a particular moment in time was, and continues to be, limited at best. There are geographical and architectural inaccuracies that leave the reader wondering if Vitruvius actually saw much of what was inserted within the treatise. And Vitruvius would have generalized in order to arrive at the broad sets of tenets contained in the books. The "looseness" characterizing the tenets of Vitruvius is precisely what has enabled imaginative interpretations over the centuries. By including drawings within translations, the classical imagination has become fused with memories of what monuments should look like. Linked to this, translated versions of Vitruvius' treatise can be usurped in order to connect ruins more closely to Roman architectural ideals than they may have been in the first place. The translation and annotation project of Jean Gardet and Dominique Bertin in the 1550s is an example of how the treatise of Vitruvius was attached, inextricably, to the antiquities of southern France. The habit of turning to the De Architectura in order to produce a body of archaeological knowledge and in turn to provide "proof for the architectural reconstruction of classical monuments has persisted. In the end, the monument can serve as confirmation for the translated text, and the text re-confirms the [...]