The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just
announced
his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei
Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the
world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from
commuters’ groans to declarations from classicists that this single act
proves the nobility of the human species.
The road in question, running along the Forum.
This curious range of reactions seems the perfect moment for me to
discuss something I have intended to talk about for some time: the shape
of the City of Rome itself. We all know the long, rich history of the
Roman people, and the city’s importance as the center of an empire, and
thereafter as the center of the memory of that empire, whose echo, long
after its end, still so defines Western concepts of power, authority and
peace. What I intend to discuss instead is the geographic city, and
how its shape and layers grew gradually and constantly, shaped by famous
events, but also by the centuries you won’t hear much about in a
traditional history of the city. The different parts of Rome’s past
left their fingerprints on the city’s shape in far more direct ways than
one tends to realize, even from visiting and walking through the city.
Rome’s past shows not only in her monuments and ruins, but in the very
layout of the streets themselves. Going age by age, I will attempt to
show how the city’s history and structure are one and the same, and how
this real ancient city shows her past in a far more organic and
structural way than what we tend invent when we concoct fictitious
ancient capitals to populate fantasy worlds or imagined futures. (As a
bonus to anyone who’s been to Rome, this will also tell you why it’s a
particularly physically grueling city to visit, compared to, say,
Florence or Paris.)
Sigmund
Freud had a phobia of Rome. You can see it in his letters, and the
many times he uses Rome as a simile or metaphor for psychological
issues, both broadly and his own. He fretted for decades before finally
making the visit. Part of it was a cultural inferiority complex.
Europe’s never-fading memory of the greatness of the Roman empire was
intentionally magnified in the Renaissance by Italian humanists who set
out to convince the world that Roman culture was the best culture, and
that the only way to achieve true greatness was to slavishly imitate the
noble Romans. Italians did this as a power play to try to overcome the
political weakness of Italy, but as a result, in the 19th and 18th
centuries, many intellectuals in many nations were brought up in a
mindset of constantly measuring their own nations only by how far they
fell short of the imagined perfection of Rome. Freud was one of many
young intellectuals in Germany, Poland, and other parts of Europe who
were terribly intimidated by the Idea of Rome, and the sense that their
own nations could never approach its greatness.
Rome’s
layers: ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, modern, all jumbled together in
an insoluble stack of meaning and contradictions. And that road.
But Freud had a second fear: a fear of Rome’s layers. In formal
treatises, he compared the psyche to an ancient city, with many layers
of architecture built one on top of another, each replacing the last,
but with the old structures still present underneath. In private
writings he phrased this more personally, that he was terrified of ever
visiting Rome because he was terrified of the idea of all the layers and
layers and layers of destroyed structures hidden under the surface, at
the same time present and absent, visible and invisible. He was, in a
very deep way, absolutely right. Rome is a mass of layers, the physical
form of different time periods still present in the walls and streets,
and when you study them enough to know what you are really looking at,
they reach back so staggeringly far, through so many lifetimes, that if
you let yourself think seriously about them it is easy to be overwhelmed
by the enormity of it all.
I will begin by discussing a single building as an example, and then the broader structure of the city.
The Basilica of San Clemente:
San Clemente is a modestly-sized church a couple blocks East of the
Colosseum, one of many hundreds of churches in Rome, and, in my mind,
the most Roman. It was built in honor of Pope Clement I (d. 99 AD), an
important early medieval cleric who traveled East and returned, making
him one of the most important linking figures between the Catholic and
Eastern Orthodox worlds. One enters the church from a plain, hot street
populated by closed doors plus an antique shop and a mediocre pizzeria.
Outside the door is a beggar disguised as someone who works for the
Church trying to extort money from tourists by convincing them that they
have to pay him to enter. Within, a lovely, lofty church with marble
columns, frescoed chapels, a beautiful stone floor, stunning gold
mosaics in the nave, and a gilded wood ceiling. It is populated by
milling tourists, and perhaps a couple of the Irish Dominicans who are
now its custodians. It is reasonably impressive, but when we pause and
look more closely, we realize the decoration is not as simple as it
seems. Nothing matches, for a simple reason: No two pieces of this
church are from the same time.
The basic structure of the church, the actual edifice, is from the twelfth century. But nothing else.
Look at the columns first: beautiful colored marble columns with
delightful translucent swirls of stone. But they don’t match: they’re
different colors, even different heights, and have non-matching capitals
and different size bases to try to make them fit. These columns
weren’t made for this building, they are looted columns, carried off
from Roman buildings all around the city and repurposed for this Church.
These columns, therefore, were cut about 1,000 years before the
construction of this church.
The floor too is Roman mosaic tile, inlaid with pieces of porphyry
and serpentine, materials unachievable after the empire’s fall. If they
are here, they were carried here after the 12th-century Church was
built and re-used.
What else? There is the stunning mosaic. It looks like nothing else
we’ve seen in Rome, and with good reason. It looks Russian or
byzantine, a totally different style. Foreign artists must have come in
to create this, not in a Roman style of decoration at all but one more
Eastern. Our Eastern Church devotees of Saint Clement have been here.
We turn around next, and spot a lovely side chapel with frescoes of a
saint’s life, in a familiar Renaissance style. We might have seen this
on the walls of Florence, produced in the late 1400s or earlier 1500s,
and can immediately start playing Spot the Saint.
But next we make the mistake of looking up, and realize that this
massive hanging gilded wood ceiling is entirely wrong, with overflowing
ribbons and a dominant central painting of a much more flowy,
ornamented, emotional, voluptuous Baroque style than everything else.
The artist who painted those modest Spot the Saint frescoes would never
drown a scene in little cherubs and clouds like this, nor would that
ceiling ever have been near these Roman columns.
The upper walls too have Baroque decoration. Even an untrained eye is
aware something is wrong. The practiced eye can tell instantly that
the ceiling must be late sixteenth century at the very earliest and is
more likely seventeenth or eighteenth, three hundred years newer than
the Spot the Saint frescoes, which were two hundred years after the
mosaics, which are two hundred years after the church was built using
stolen Roman materials that were already 1,000 years old. Freud,
exploring the church with us, has vertigo.
Next we look down.
What’s this? What are these arches in the wall next to the floor?
Why would there be arches there? It makes no sense. Even in a
building that used secondary supporting arches in the brickwork there
would be a reason for it, a window above, a junction, and they would end
at floor level. Our architecture-sense is tingling.
So we go down stairs…
Welcome to the 4th century Roman basilica which the 12th century
upper church was built on top of. Here we see characteristic dense,
flat Roman bricks, and late classical curved-corner ceiling structures
laying out what used to be an early Christian church. This church was
800 years old when it was buried to build the larger one above it. The
walls are studded with shards of Roman sculpture, uncovered during the
excavations, bits of broken tombs, halves of portrait faces and the
middle of an Apollo, and a slab with a Roman pagan funerary inscription
on one side which was re-used and has an early Christian inscription on
the other side, in much cruder lettering.
And here too there are frescoes. Legend has that Saint Clement’s
remains were carried from the East back to Rome in 869 AD, and this
lower church is the place they would have been carried to, as we see now
in a fresco depicting the scene, painted probably shortly thereafter.
Other 9th century frescoes (300 years older than the church above)
show the lives of other now-obscure figures who were important in the
800s. One features a portrait of an early pope (Leo IV), the only known
image of this largely-forgotten figure. Another features Christ
freeing Adam from Limbo, and to their left a man in a very
Eastern-looking hat, another relic of the importance of this church as a
center for Rome’s contact with the east.
Another wonderful fresco, of the life of a popular hermit, features a
story in which a pagan demands that his servants carry the saint out of
his house, but he goes mad and believes a column is the saint, and
flogs and curses his slaves as he forces them to carry the column. In
this fresco we find inscriptions in Latin, but also a phrase coming out
of the man’s mouth (a very crude one cursing his slaves as bastards and
sons of prostitutes) which is the oldest known inscription in a language
identifiable as, not Latin, but Italian. The Italian language has come
to exist between the construction of this church and the construction
of the one above. (The inscription is at the bottom in the white area
above the column, hard to make out.)
You can see it better in this reconstruction:
One more fresco is worth visiting: the Madonna of the funny-looking hat.
When archaeologists opened up the under layer, they found a Madonna,
probably 8th century, which then decayed before their eyes (horror!) due
to exposure to the air. Underneath they found another Madonna
(delight!) wearing this extremely strange hat. They looked more
closely: the Christ child in her lap is not original, but was painted on
after the Madonna. This is not a Madonna at all, it is a portrait, and
that hat belongs to none other than the Byzantine Empress Theodora.
Someone painted a portrait of the empress here (who used to be a
prostitute, I might add), then someone else redid her as a Madonna,
then, a century or two later, someone else painted over that Madonna
with another Madonna, now lost, who presumably had a more reasonable
hat.
Wandering a bit we find more modern additions, post-excavation. One
of the most beloved 20th century heads of the Vatican Library has been
buried here, just below the now-restored old altar of the lower church.
And the tombs of St. Cyril and Methodius are here, creators of the
Glagolitic alphabet (ancestor of the Cyrillic), surrounded by plaques
and donations and tokens of thanksgiving from many Slavic countries who
use that alphabet. Below is a modern mosaic, thanking them for their
work:
And nearby there are stairs down… Freud needs to stop and breathe into a paper bag.
There are stairs down because this is not the bottom layer, not yet.
The 4th century church was built on top of something else. We descend
another floor and find ourselves in older, pre-Christian Roman
brickwork. We find high vaults, frescoed with simple colorful
decoration, as was popular in villas and public buildings. Hallways and
rooms extend off, a large, complex building. Very complex. Experts on
Roman building layout can tell us this was once a fine Roman villa of
the first century AD. In that period it had sprawling rooms, a
courtyard, storerooms… but its foundations aren’t quite the right shape.
If we look at the walls, the layout, it seems that before the villa
there was an industrial building, the Mint of the Roman Republic (you
heard me, Republic! Before the Empire!), but it was destroyed by a fire
(the Great Fire of 64 AD) and then rebuilt as a Roman villa. Before it
was a church… before it was another church.
Except… there are tunnels. There are narrow, meandering tunnels
twining out from the walls of this villa, leading in strange,
unpredictable directions, and far too tight to be proper Roman
architecture. This villa was on a slope, and some of these rooms are
dug into the rocky slope so they would have been underground even when
it was a residence. Romans didn’t
do that.
Houston, we have a labyrinth, a genuine, intentional underground
labyrinth, and with a bit more digging we find out why. This was a
Mithraeum, a secret cult site of the Mithraic mystery cult, which
worshipped the resurrection god Mithras. Here initiates dwelled in
dormitories for their years of apprenticeship, waiting their turn to
enter the clandestine curved vault, sprawl on its stone couches, and
participate in the cult orgy in which they take hallucinogens, play
mind-bending music, and ritually sacrifice a bull and drink its blood in
order to achieve resurrection.
We wander still farther, daring the labyrinth, much of which has not
yet been excavated, and come upon another room in which we hear the
bubbling of a spring. A natural spring, miraculously bubbling up from
nowhere in the depths of Rome. Very probably a sacred spring.
While Freud sits down to put his head between his legs for a while
(on a 1st century AD built-in bench, I should add) we can finally piece
this muddle of contradictory and mismatched objects together into a
probable chronology:
Once
upon a time there was a natural spring bubbling up at this spot in what
was then the grassy outskirts of early Rome. It is reasonable to guess
that a modest cult site might have sprung up around this spring,
honoring its nymph or some such, as was quite common. In time, the city
expanded and this once-abandoned area became desirable for industrial
use as the Republic gained an empire. The Republic’s Mint was built
here, making use of the convenient ice cold water, and likely continuing
to honor its associated spirit. Decades pass, a century, two, Rome
expands still further, and chaos raises an Emperor. After the Great
Fire of 64 AD, it becomes convenient to move the Mint out of what is now
a desirable central district of the expanding city, so the site is
purchased by a wealthy Roman who builds his house here. Decades pass
and the builder, or his son, is converted to the exciting cult of this
new god Mithras who promises his followers, not the gray mists of Hades,
but resurrection and eternity. Since he is wealthy, he converts his
home to the use of the cult, and digs tunnels and creates the
underground Mithraeum. For a generation or two this villa hosts the
cult, but then Constantine comes to power and a new cult promising an
even more inclusive form of salvation comes into vogue. The villa,
which is now three hundred years old, is buried, a convenient
architectural choice since the ground level of the city has risen
several times due to regular Tiber floods, so the old house was in a low
spot. A new church is built on top, and serves the Roman Christians of
the local community for a few generations. In 435 Rome is sacked by
the Visigoths, but the conquerors are also Christian so the church
stands and still serves the neighborhood, though its population is much
smaller. Now the main Emperor moves to the East, and in the 500s, when
the church is about 200 years old, someone paints a portrait of the
empress on the wall, then a generation later someone else decides a
Madonna is more appropriate, and puts a baby in her lap. Two or three
more generations go by and Cyril and Methodius bring the bones of
Clement from the East, and they are buried here, a great day for the
neighborhood! Commemorated with more frescoes.
Another
century, two, we are well into the Middle Ages, and this old Roman
building is old-fashioned and very low since the ground level has risen
further. The local community, and devotees of St. Clement, decide to
build a new church. They loot columns and flooring from other Roman
sites, and bury the old church, producing the 12th century structure
above, but using the walls of the older one as the foundation, so the
arches still show in the walls. The new church is very plain, but is
soon decorated using mosaics provided by Eastern artists who come to
visit Clement and Cyril. After a few generations the Renaissance
begins, and we call in a fashionable Florentine-style artist to fresco
one chapel. A few centuries later Pope Clement VIII comes to power and
decides to spiff up San Clemente, initiating the internal redecoration
which will end with the ornate baroque ceiling.
Oh,
and somewhere in there someone slapped on a courtyard on the outside in
a Neoclassical style, because it became vogue for buildings to look
classical, so we may as well add a faux-classical facade onto this
medieval building which we no longer remember has a real classical
building hidden underneath. Not long after the Baroque redecoration is
begun, the nineteenth-century interest in archaeology notices those
arches in the walls, and starts digging, re-exposing the lower layers.
Devotees of St. Cyril and lovers of history, like the head of the
Vatican Library, begin to flock to San Clemente as an example of Rome’s
long and layered history, and so it gains more layers in the 20th
century as donations and burials are added to it. Every century from
the Republican Roman construction of the Mint to the 20th century tombs
is physically present, actually physically represented by an artifact
which is still part of this building which has been being built and
rebuilt for over 2,000 years. Not a single century passed in which this
spot was not being used and transformed, and every transformation is
still here. And all that time, from the first sacred spring, to the
Mithraism, to today’s Irish Dominicans, this spot has been sacred.
This is Freud’s metaphor for the psyche: structure after structure
built in the same space, superimposing new functions over the old ones,
never really losing anything.
This is Rome.
San Clemente is exceptional in that it has been largely excavated and
is accessible, but every single building in Rome is like this, built on
medieval foundations which are built on classical ones. I can’t tell
you how many times I’ve gone into a random pizzeria and found a
Renaissance fresco, or a medieval beam, or Roman marble. I’ve gone into
a cafe restroom and discovered the back wall was curved because this
was built on the foundations of Pompey’s theater (where Caesar was
assassinated). I’ve gone into churches to discover their restrooms used
to be part of different churches. Friends have this experience too.
During my Fulbright year in Italy I had a colleague who was studying
Roman altars, half of which you could only get at by ringing the bell of
strangers’ apartments and saying: “Hello! I’m an archaeologist, and
according to this list there’s a Roman sacrificial altar here?” to which
the standard response is, “Oh, yes, come on in, it’s in the basement
next to the washing machine.” I have another friend who thinks he’s
found a lost chapel frescoed by a major Renaissance artist hidden in an
elevator shaft. Another friend once told me of a pizza place with a
trap door down to not-yet-tallied catacombs. I believe it.
As with San Clemente, so for Rome: layers on layers on layers:
If San Clemente’s narrative starts with a sacred spring and the Roman
Mint, Rome’s narrative starts with scared people on a hill.
Welcome to the archaic period. You are a settler. Your goals are
securing enough food to stay alive, and avoiding deadly threats. The
major threats are (A) lions, (B) wolves, (C) wild boar, (D) other
humans, who travel in raiding parties, killing and taking. You are
looking for a safe, defensible spot to settle down. You find one. The
Tiber river, which floods regularly producing a fertile tidal basin rich
with crops and game, takes a bend and has a small island in it. At
that same spot there are several extremely steep, rocky hills, almost
like mesas, with practically cliff-like faces. In such a place you can
live on top of the hill but hunt, farm, and gather on the fertile
stretch below. And you can even sail up and down the river, making
trade and travel easy. Perfect.
The very first settlement at Rome, in the archaic period, was a small
settlement on the Capitoline hill, one of the smallest hills but
closest to the river. (Are you, perchance, from a country? With a
government that meets in a “capitol” building? If so, your “capitol” is
named after the Capitoline hill, because that’s how frikkin’ important
this hill is!) The valleys around are used mainly for farming, but also
for burials, and the first tombs are very simple ones, just a hole with
dirt, or sometimes a ceramic tile lid. The buildings in this era are
brick decorated with terra cotta. Eventually the first major temple is
built on the Capitoline hill, with a stone foundation but still terra
cotta decoration, and is dedicated to Jupiter. Its foundations remain,
and you can see them, in situ, in the Capitoline museum which will be
built on the same spot a few millenia later.
A
more developed form of the settlement. The Temple of Jupiter with
its
red roof still stands on the Capitoline hill, while buildings have now
filled the valleys below.
This hill turns out to be a great place to live, and the population
thrives. In time the hill is too crowded. People spread to the
neighboring hills, and start building in the little valley in between.
As the population booms and spreads to cover all seven hills, the space
between the first few becomes the desirable downtown, the most
important commercial center, where the best shops and markets are. This
is the Forum, and here more temples and law courts and the Senate House
are built.
South
is up in this image. To the right is the Capitoline, still with the
Temple of Jupiter. In the center you see the deep valley which
becomes
the Forum.
In time, defensive walls go up around the area around the hills, to
make a greater chunk of land defensible. In time, the walls are too
constrained, so another set goes up around them.
As the population booms and Rome becomes a serious city, serious
enough to start thinking about conquering her neighbors and maybe having
a war with someone (Carthage anyone?), this area is now the super
desirable downtown. The commercial centers migrate outward to give way
to monuments and temples, the Mint is built out on a grassy spot past
where there is not yet a Colosseum, and the hills near the Forum become
reserved for sacred spaces, state buildings, and the houses of the super
rich. On one, the Palatine hill, a certain Octavian of the Julii
builds his house, and when Caesar is assassinated and the first and
second triumvirates result in an Emperor, it becomes the imperial
palace. (Does your capital contain a palace? If so it’s named after the
Palatine hill, because Augustus was so powerful that all rulers’ grand
houses are forever named after his house).
I
am now standing on the Capitoline Hill, with the Temple of Jupiter
behind me. I am looking down the Forum, and the Palatine hill, where
the
Imperial Palace was, is the high tree-lined crest to the right.
Rome again spills over her walls and builds even farther out. The
great fire of 64 AD destroys many districts, but she rebuilds quickly,
and what was the Mint is replaced by a villa which soon becomes a
Mithraeum. Rome reaches its imperial heights, a sprawling city of a
million souls, and the seven hills that were once defensive are now
sparkling pillars of all-marble high-class real estate, and also very
tiring to climb.
Here
North is up. You can see the island to the left, and the Colosseum.
To
the right of the island is a small semi-circular building, which is the
Theater of Marcellus. A bit to the right of that, sticking up above the
rest,
you can still see the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill.
With Constantine, Christianity now becomes a centerpiece of Roman
life, and of the city’s architecture. Major Christian sites are built:
St. Peter’s, St. John Lateran, St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, etc. These
sites become pilgrimage centers, and economic centers. They are
scattered in far corners all around Rome, but all the sites have
something in common: they are in corners. The major Christian centers
of Rome are all on its periphery, not in the center. There are two
reasons for this.
First, and simplest, the center of Rome was, by this time, already
full. Sometimes you could find an old villa that used to be a mint to
build a small church on, but the center was full of mid-sized temples,
which could be rededicated but not replaced, and huge imperial function
spaces and government buildings, plus valuable real estate. If you want
to build a big new temple to a big new God, you need to do it in the
not-yet-developed areas around the city’s edge.
You can rent a bike for a day and bike up the Appian Way to visit the tombs of the Roman necropolis.
Second, many of these sites were built on tombs, like St. Peter’s,
built across the river in the cheap land no one wanted. Roman law banned
burying the dead within the city limits, because disturbing a tomb
could bring the wrath of the dead upon the city, but if you build
immovable tombs in the middle of your city it makes city redevelopment
impossible, so they have to be outside. This is the origin of the
necropolis or “city of the dead”, the cluster of tombs right outside the
gates of a Roman city, where the residents bury their dead. Some major
Roman Roads, like the Via Appia, are still lined with rows of tombs
stretching along the street for miles out from where the city limits
used to be defined. Thus early Christian martyrs were buried outside
the city, and their cult sites developed at the edges of the city. The
land which became the Vatican, for example, was across the river, full
of wild beasts and scary Etruscan tribesmen in archaic Rome, then was
used for a necropolis in Imperial Rome, had enough empty cheap land to
build a big circus (where much of the throwing of Christians to the
lions happened, since only in such cheap real estate could you build a
stadium big enough to hold the huge audiences who wanted to come see
lions eat Christians), and finally Constantine demolished the circus and
necropolis to build St. Peter’s to honor St. Peter who had been
martyred in that circus and buried in the necropolis in secret 300 years
before (when San Clemente was still a Mint). St. Peter’s, and the
other Christian sites, bring new importance to Rome’s outskirts. We now
have a bull’s-eye-shaped city, in which imperial government Rome is the
center, and Christian Rome is a ring around the outside, with rings of
thriving, happy commercial and residential districts in between.
Visigothic damage to the columns of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, now the Church of San Lorenzo.
435 AD: the Visigoths arrive and plunder the city. Many thousands
are killed, and the beautiful center of Rome is ransacked, temples
toppled, looted, burned. In the Forum, the raiders throw chains around
the columns of one of my favorite layered Roman buildings, the temple of
Antoninus and Faustina. The Visigoths try to pull the columns down
with their chains, and fail, but slice gouges deep into the stone which
you can still see today. To re-check time, the Temple of Antoninus and
Faustina was built in 141 AD, when San Clemente was a villa with an
active Mithraeum in it. When it received these scars in the Visigothic
raid, the Mithraeum had been buried, and the church built on top was
just starting to be decorated. And underneath the Temple of Antoninus
and Faustina we have found archaic grave sites which were 1,000 years
old when the temple was built 2,000 years ago–the people buried in those
graves very likely drank water from the spring that still burbles up
under San Clemente. As for the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, a few
centuries after its near-miss, the temple will be rededicated as the
major Roman church of San Lorenzo, due to a legend that it was on these
temple steps that Saint Lawrence was sentenced to be grilled alive. And
not far from it, the Lapis Niger was excavated which contains a
language which has not yet become Latin, much as San Clemente’s frescoes
preserve one which is becoming Italian. One language evolved into
another, then into a third, but this spot was still being used, just
like today.
When buildings get knocked down: reuse, recycle.
Rome was sacked, but afterwards Rome was still there. The Goths
didn’t just take everything and leave – the Ostragoths who followed the
Visigoths decided to become the new Roman Emperors and rule Italy. The
surviving Roman patrician families started working for the new Gothic
king, but still had a Senate, taxes, processions, traffic cops, and did
all the early Medieval equivalents of keeping the trains running on
time. A century later, in the 540s, the Plague of Justinian hits and
Rome loses another huge hunk of its population. But it still ticks on,
and there is still a Senate, and a people of Rome.
So what was different? From a city-planning sense, the key is that
the population was much smaller. In a sprawling metropolis designed to
hold a million people, we now had maybe twenty thousand. Thus, as
always happens when a city’s population shrinks, real estate was
abandoned. But instead of abandoning the outskirts, people abandoned
the middle. Rome was important mostly as a Christian center now, with
the pope, and pilgrims coming to major temples, so they occupied the
edges, and that’s where the money was. Rome becomes a hollow city, a
doughnut, with an abandoned center surrounded by a populated ring. We
have reached Medieval Rome. The city population lives mainly over by
the Vatican, in the once empty district across the river, and a few
other Christian sites around the edge. The middle of the city has been
abandoned so long that the Tiber has buried the ruins, and people graze
sheep in what used to be the Forum. The old buildings are now little
more than quarries, big piles of stone and brick which we can steal from
if, for example, we happen to need some nice columns to build a new
church on top of this old church of San Clemente.
A Renaissance map of Rome, with the population clustered by the Vatican.
Enter
the Renaissance, Petrarch, and humanism. Petrarch writes of the glory
that was Rome, and convinces Italy that, if they can reconstruct that,
they can be great again, just as when they conquered the Goths and
Germans. Popes and lords become hungry for the symbols of power which
Rome once was. Petrarch reads his Cicero and his Sallust, and visits
the empty center of the city. This is the Capitoline Hill, he says,
where once stood the Temple of Jupiter, and where the Romans crowned
their poets and triumphant generals. Wanting to be great again, the
popes volunteer to rebuild the Capitoline, as do the wealthy Roman
families, who sincerely believe they are descended from the same Roman
Senators who kept the bread and circuses running on time through
Visigoths and more. Michelangelo and Raphael crack their knuckles. New
palaces are built on the Capitoline Hill, neoclassical inventions based
on what artists thought ancient authors like Vitruvius were talking
about. In time the population grows, and Rome’s wealth increases thanks
to the Church and to the PR campaign of Petrarch and his followers. The
empty parts of the inner city are re-colonized, by Cardinals building
grand palaces, and poorer people building what they can to live near the
Cardinals who give them employment. But it is all built out of the
convenient stone that’s lying around, and on top of convenient
foundations that used to be the buildings of Constantinian Rome when she
boasted 1,000,000 souls.
Still… so… many… stairs!
Rome grows and refills and grows and refills from the outside in,
with the Capitoline as a new center artificially reconstructed by
Renaissance ambition. As the 18th and 19th centuries arrive, the city
is full again, but the middle ring, between outside and center, is all
the newest stuff, to the historian and tourist the least interesting.
This is why everything that tourists come to see in Rome is a long bus
ride from everything else, and why you have to go up and down a million
exhausting hills to get anywhere. Rome has a belt of cultural
no-man’s-land in and around it, separating the center from the Christian
outskirts, and making it forever inconvenient.
In the 18th and 19th centuries we also start to have archaeology, and
dig up the Forum, and begin to protect and reconstruct the ancient
monuments, and recognize that this largely abandoned patch of valley
behind the Capitoline Hill is, arguably, the most important couple
blocks of real estate that has ever existed in the history of the world.
We paint Romantic paintings of it, and sketch what it must have looked
like once, and it becomes part of the coming-of-age of every elite
young European to make the pilgrimage to it (that Freud so fears!) and
see the relics of what once was Rome. Everywhere else the classical
layer is under a pile of palaces and churches and pizzerias, but here in
the precious Forum valley, between those hills that sheltered the first
Romans, we have lifted the upper layers and exposed Rome’s ancient
heart.
HELLO! I AM MUSSOLINI! I AM THE NEW ROME! MY EMPIRE WILL LAST 1000
YEARS! MY STUFF IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THIS ANCIENT STUFF! WHEN I AM
DONE, NO ONE WILL CARE ABOUT CLASSICAL RELICS ANYMORE! I AM GOING TO
KNOCK DOWN ALL THE ANCIENT STUFF AND BUILD MY STUFF ON TOP!
Specifically
Mussolini built a road straight through the middle of the Forum.
Fascism was a strange moment in human history, and Rome’s, and left a
lot of scars. One of them is the Via dei Fori Imperiali, a grand
boulevard running along the Forum and around the Capitoline, which
Mussolini built so he could have processions, and to declare to the
world how sure he was that no one would care about the Roman relics he
was paving over. They would not care about the Temple of Jupiter, or
the Renaissance palace on top of it, but about the new monuments he
carved into the city’s heart. Those, and he, would be remembered, Caesar
and Augustus forgotten.
To quote my favorite column by the old Anime Answerman: “Dear kid,
please tell your friend that no one has ever been more wrong in the
entire history of time.”
The
Fascist road through the Forum, and the enormous white “wedding cake”
monument on the side of the Capitoline hill. It was a monument built
for the Unification of Italy, later redecorated with a thick icing of
fascist decor. The Temple of Jupiter would be just off-camera to the
right.
Unification monument, built into the Capitoline.
Mussolini, like the Visigoths, came but did not entirely go. One of
his remnants is a system of large boulevards scarred into the face of
the city, intended for his grand Fascist processions. Many of these are
now difficult to eliminate, since car traffic in Rome is already a
special kind of hell (fitting as a subsection of Circle 7 Part 2, I’d
say, violence against ourselves and our creations, though it could be 4,
hoarding/wasting, or yet another pouch of 8). The worst offender,
though, is this road which is currently still covering up about a
quarter of the ancient Forum, and also separates a quarter of the
remaining Forum from the other half. It is this road that the new Mayor
proposes to eliminate. The extra Fascist decoration which Mussolini
added to the “wedding cake” will stay, the right call in my opinion,
since Fascism is now one of Rome’s layers, just as much as the
Visigothic scars on the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina. But lifting
the road away will give us the true breadth of the Forum back in a way
no pocket diagram can replicate. The transition will be painful for the
FIATs and Vespas that now swarm where long ago the early Romans fought
Etruscans and wild boar, but it is also an important validation of the
Forum’s status as Rome’s most special spot. Everywhere else is layers.
Everywhere else, when there’s Baroque on top of Renaissance on top of
medieval, we leave it there. The altar stays behind the washing
machine, and the need to open yet another catacomb is smaller than the
need to have a working pizzeria. But in the Forum the layers have been
lifted away. This one heart of one moment in Rome’s history, or at
least one patch of about seven active centuries, we expose and preserve
in honor of the importance that little spot has had as the definition of
power, empire, war, and peace for Europe for 2,000 years. Thus, I hope
you will all join me saying thank you to Mayor Marino.
Rome’s marathon. No city planner would put these things in this arrangement, ever! But history did.
The Forum is our relic of Rome’s antiquity, but it is not, for one
who knows the city, the true proof that this is a great ancient capital.
That would be clear even if not an inch of Roman marble remained in
situ. The proof of Rome’s antiquity is its layout, the organic
development of a wildly inconvenient but rich city plan, with those
impassable hills at the center, the Tiber dividing the main city from
the across-the-river part which is still the “new” part and still
politically distinct, with its own soccer team, even after thousands of
years. Antiquity is the nonsensical distribution of city mini-centers,
the secondary hubs around the Vatican and St. John Lateran, the crowded
shops clinging to the cliff-like faces of the hills, the Spanish Steps
which are there because you have to go up that ridiculous hill and it’s
really tall. Antiquity is not the Colosseum, it’s the fact that the
Colosseum is smack inconveniently in the middle of a terrible traffic
circle, definitely not where anyone would put a Colosseum on purpose if
the modern city planners had a choice. Antiquity is structure, the
presence of layers, unlike young, planned cities where everything is
still in a place that makes sense because that city has only had one or
two purposes throughout its history. Rome has had many purposes:
shelter, commerce, conquest, post-conquest/plague refugee camp,
religious capital, center of cultural rebirth, new capital, finally
tourist pilgrimage site. All those Romes are in a pile, and the chaos
that pile creates is the authentic ancient city. Rome is that cafe
bathroom with a curved wall that proves it is where Caesar was
assassinated. In another thousand years I don’t know what will be
there, a space-ship docking station or a food cube kiosk, but whatever
it is I know it will still have that curved back wall.
If you enjoyed this, see also my historical introduction to Florence.
FOOTNOTE: For those who care, the context of that Anime Answerman quotation:
Kid writing in: “Dear Anime Answerman, my friend tells me that Inuyasha is a more violent show than Elfen Leid, and I don’t believe them, but I can’t tell them they’re wrong because my Mom won’t let me watch Elfen Leid.”
Answerman: “Dear kid, please tell your friend that no one has ever been more wrong in the entire history of time.”
