Arco dei Gavi Historical Timeline

A private monument on a public road, signed by its architect, taken to pieces by an army and put back together a century later from a wooden model. Very little of that sequence is normal for a Roman arch.

Chronology

1. early 1st century A.D. Built at the end of Augustus’s reign or the first years of Tiberius’s, by the Gavia family for themselves. Roman arches were normally imperial; this one commemorates a family, which is why it is small and carefully proportioned rather than overwhelming.
2. — Its architect signs it: Lucius Vitruvius Cerdo, a freedman of Greek origin. Roman buildings are overwhelmingly anonymous, and a named architect who was also a former slave is rarer still.
3. 12th century Absorbed into the city walls and renamed Porta di San Zeno. Being useful as a gate is what keeps it standing while freestanding monuments are quarried.
4. 14th century Taken into Castelvecchio’s defensive system — which is why the two end up side by side today.
5. 1550 The Venetian Republic transfers the area to private owners, who clear the medieval structures around it. The arch is freed from the wall it had been buried in for four centuries.
6. 1805 The French military engineers dismantle it for military and traffic reasons. The blocks are kept.
7. 1812 The architect Giuseppe Barbieri builds a wooden scale model recording every stone. That model is the reason reassembly was possible at all, 120 years later.
8. 1920 Antonio Avena — the same man who would restore Castelvecchio — first proposes rebuilding it. Work is authorised in 1931.
9. 1932 Inaugurated on 28 October in the small square beside Castelvecchio, reassembled block by block. It is genuinely Roman stone in a genuinely twentieth-century assembly, and not on its original site.
10. 2011 Excavations nearby uncover the domus di Castelvecchio, the Roman house the arch once stood among.

What anastylosis means here

Recover the original material, identify where each piece belonged, put it back, and make any new work distinguishable from the old. It is the same method used on Ponte Pietra after the war, and in both cases it produces a monument that is simultaneously ancient and modern.

Beside the arch is a stretch of Roman paving with visible wheel ruts — the surface it was built to span.