Roma

About

All buildings of Rome, and of the Vatican City inside it, as the region surveyed them in 2014, and finished since: coloured by when they were built and set in the history that shaped them.

Made with 💙 by Jacopo Ottaviani

Italian data journalist and computer scientist, Chief Data Officer at Code for Africa. Builds investigative stories with data, code, maps and AI, published in The Guardian, Der Spiegel, El País and Internazionale.

Inspired by

Amsterdam, building by building by Alex Barakov, whose code (MIT licence) this map adapts to Rome, itself inspired by Sasha Bogachev’s Paris, building by building.

Data

How the buildings are dated

Rome has no register that dates each building, as Amsterdam and Paris do. Every building’s card says which source dated it.

  • Wikidata dates buildings from their own entries: monuments, churches, palaces. A building still being built in 2014 takes its opening date.
  • The 2011 census counts each section’s residential buildings by period of construction. The section’s homes get those periods in the same proportions: the period is the census’s, which house got which is an estimate ( buildings). Read the colours as the age of a neighbourhood more than of a single house.
  • Before 1919 or undated. In the eight rioni laid out after 1870 the census’s “before 1919” becomes 1871–1918. Elsewhere it stays undated ( buildings), with ruins, monuments and fountains no source dates, and appears on the timeline in 1870.
  • ISPRA’s land maps of Rome, for 2006, 2012 and every year to 2021, date the buildings the survey found under construction and the buildings newer than it, whose footprints come from OpenStreetMap: the year is the first map that shows a finished building there ( buildings). That is when the structure is visible from above, often a year or two before it opens. Buildings the maps cannot date stay “under construction” in the year of their survey ().
  • Everything else, offices, churches, schools and sheds, takes the date of its nearest dated neighbours and is drawn faded ( buildings).

Heights are the eaves the 2014 survey measured; a newer building takes its height or storeys from OpenStreetMap, or else the median height of its neighbours. Storeys are height divided by 3.2 m. Data downloaded on 14 October 2026.

A non-commercial project, made out of curiosity and for education.

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