This project, a frieze on the walls of the Lungotevere between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini, a distance of some 500 metres, was many years in the making. It was promoted, pushed and brought to fruition by Kristin Jones, who long had the idea and a wish for the bank of the Tiber river to be a space for public art. The work really started out of a sense of my own ignorance. I knew on the one hand, as we all do, of the glories of Rome – the Basilica of St Peter on the Trastevere side of the river – and I was also aware much later, maybe in my twenties, of the existence of the ghetto – the enclosed section for Jews on the other side of the river, about a kilometre down from St Peter’s. I had never thought of them as connected and I suppose it was a gap in my knowledge the that the establishment of the ghetto and the growth of St Peter’s had happened at the same time. What I had known of Rome was the great cathedrals, the glories of the Baroque and the starting shock of the project was that realization that the ghetto was actually a project of modernity. If you were to take a straight line from St Peter’s to the ghetto, it would more or less run straight through the section of the Tiber on which the work was done.