Palazzo Wedekind, Neoclassical palazzo in Piazza Colonna, Rome, Italy.
Palazzo Wedekind is a neoclassical building on Piazza Colonna in central Rome, recognizable by its wide portico of 16 Ionic columns. The portico runs the full width of the facade and covers the pavement in front, giving the building an open, colonnaded front facing the square.
The building was erected in 1838 under Pope Gregory XVI, replacing older structures that had previously stood on the site. Later the German-Italian publisher Ludovico Wedekind acquired it and ran the newspaper Il Tempo from here, which is how the palazzo got its name.
The ancient columns along the facade came from Veio, an Etruscan city north of Rome, and were reused rather than newly made. Anyone looking closely at the columns can notice that the stone shows slightly different tones, hinting at their origins from separate excavations.
The building sits directly on Piazza Colonna and is easy to reach on foot from most central parts of Rome. The interior is not open to visitors since it serves as office space, but the portico and facade are fully visible from the square at any time.
The 16 columns of the portico were salvaged from archaeological digs at Veio, making them among the few ancient elements openly built into a 19th-century building in Rome. Some of them were originally intended for the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura before the 1823 fire redirected their use.
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