AULA ANNONAE

"The grain exchange’s trading floor during a morning session is the most concentrated expression of commercial energy in the empire. Five hundred people in a space designed for transparency, communicating in a coded system that the design’s architects did not anticipate, producing prices that the Annona in Nova Romae is required to accept as the market reference. Watching from the gallery without understanding the communications produces the impression of organised chaos. Understanding the communications produces the impression of organised deception. Both impressions are partially accurate."

— G.C.P.S.A., Descriptio Aethermarchae, 1197 A.P.

The Aula Annonae is the empire’s most politically significant commercial building: the third-century exchange hall where the grain futures contracts are set that determine what the Annona pays for Nova Romae’s food supply, and where the Mercatorum faction’s lobbying campaign and the Annona’s resistance play out in the practical form of pricing sessions. The building’s design — an unusually broad trading floor, glass roof panels flooding the space with daylight, the gallery above providing unobstructed sightlines to the floor from every position — was intended to make every transaction as public and transparent as possible. The result is the most honest pricing market in the empire and the most elaborate coded communication system any market has developed.

The next exchange session is in four days. Pistor knows the harvest estimates for one estate family have been false for three consecutive sessions. The coded messages Vara’s team has found suggest a document transfer is planned for the morning after the session. Both pieces are moving toward a convergence that neither party has yet seen.

Design

The trading floor accommodates five hundred people simultaneously under a glass roof that distributes the Inland Sea’s light across the space without shadow. The floor’s surface is the pale local limestone, worn to a specific smoothness over three centuries of trading sessions that gives the floor its acoustic character — the background noise level at full session is precisely predictable, which the floor traders have incorporated into their coded communications as a masking element. The gallery above runs three sides and is publicly accessible during sessions.

Founding Date

3rd century A.P.

Type

Great hall

Parent Location

LACUSUM

Environmental Effects

Session Schedule
Morning pricing session: daily during the harvest transit season (late summer through autumn).
The upcoming session in four days is the season’s fourth, at which the harvest estimate manipulation will produce its fourth price movement if unchallenged.

Access
Trading floor: credentialled commercial parties.
Gallery: public during sessions.
Management board offices: official business.

Owning Organization

Exchange Management Board