Christopher Howard is communications manager for the American Academy in Rome.
In the mid-1930s, amidst the looming tensions of a Europe on the brink of war, a young architect from Jefferson, Georgia, set out to capture the essence of a city steeped in history and undergoing rapid transformation. Richard Winston Ayers, a Rome Prize Fellow with a recent MFA from Yale University, arrived in Naples on September 26, 1936, his camera in hand and an insatiable curiosity for the architectural wonders of Italy. Over the next twenty-one months, Ayers would photograph not just buildings, but the soul of a nation at a pivotal moment in history.
The recently launched Roma150 Portal has breathed new life into Ayers’s work, selecting seventy evocative images from the Ayers Collection, now preserved in the Photographic Archive of the American Academy in Rome. These photographs are part of a larger cache of 3,564 images, taken during Ayers’s fellowship between 1936 and 1938. They offer a rare glimpse into Rome’s urban landscape during the Fascist regime, documenting the era’s grand architectural ambitions and the everyday life of its people.