Anyone who has followed the current TV adventure/soap opera Rome, knows that modern technology may bring the world of antiquity back to life.

Google is now doing its part, by adding an Ancient Rome module (”layer”) to Google Earth, its free software package for exploring the surface of the Earth.

According to Wired the The Ancient Rome 3D feature was created in conjunction with the Rome Reborn Project 2.0 at University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.

The image below is taken from the Rome Reborn project’s web site, while the image above is from Google Earth.

Needless to say the resolution of the images is much better in the original software, but Google’s version is more than acceptable.

The original digital model reflects the sources of the present knowledge about ancient Rome, including archaeological data about specific sites and features (”class 1″) and quantitative data about the distribution of building types throughout the fourteen regions of the city (”class 2″).

So far, the Rome Reborn Project has modeled 32 buildings and monuments of the ca. 200 available in class 1.

Here is Google’s own video on the 3D presentation of the capital of the Roman Empire anno 320 AD:

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