2011/07/19 by Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, Sparavigna, Amelia Carolina
Arts and Humanities · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Building materials and conservation #Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis #FOS: Physical sciences #Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph) #physics.pop-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1107.3831
arxiv created 2011/07/19 · openalex publication_date 2011/07/19 · arxiv updated 2011/07/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Two books, the "De Architectura" by Vitruvius and the "Naturalis Historia" by Pliny the Elder, give us a portrait of the Materials Science, that is, the knowledge of materials, in Rome at the beginning of the Empire. Here, I am reporting some very attractive contents that we can find in these books. The reader will see the discussion proposed in fours case studies: concretes, coatings, amorphous materials and colloidal crystals, to describe them in modern words.