I have always prided myself on having my work firmly planted in reality and exploring the world in which we all live. I had previously designed landscapes covering areas of Chicago, London and New York, but the constituent landmarks in each of those were essentially individual projects that grew to encompass broader areas. Rome was the first project I conceived of on a grand scale from the outset, and the first where I was suddenly transported to another time and a different world. With the benefit of hindsight, this was a natural progression of the works I had developed to that point. Our initial concepts varied, but we settled on my proposal to capture a large area of the city center at my signature 1:650 scale. The results were both the first times I had ever captured a broad landscape in one go and designed a specific historical period other than present-day. It’s fair to say that I never saw Rome coming. The idea of designing a large historical diorama of the ancient city was first put forth back in 2019, at the outset of my years-long collaboration with the Museu da Imaginação in São Paulo. His biggest claim to fame is possibly recreating Vatican City-an entire country-but when Rocco revealed his latest project, it became immediately clear that this was a whole different beast than anything he’s done so far.Īn attempt to recreate ancient Rome in its entirety is so ambitious that we had to have a chat with Rocco about it, especially since his track record makes actually finishing it a credible feat! Plus, the first phase of the giant diorama was finished a few months ago, and even if it features only a tenth of the total estimated number of LEGO bricks he’ll eventually use, 104,000 bricks is still pretty substantial… We’ve covered several of his builds here at BrickNerd, most recently his First Century Jerusalem diorama back in 2021. Rocco has a degree in architecture and since I first met him at Brickworld Chicago in 2015, he’s created one masterpiece more stunning than the other, pretty much all of them in his signature 1:650 scale. That kit was of course designed by Rocco Buttliere, who happens to be a good friend of mine and therefore my go-to guy for anything microscale. Regular BrickNerd readers may recall a previous article of mine, where I described the process of creating an event kit to mark the tenth anniversary of our annual Norwegian AFOL event, På Kloss Hold, in Trondheim.
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