When In Rome

On Wednesday the weather forecast was atrocious, rain all day and few to no breaks in the clouds. So the plan was to stay in Moira to read, play our new board games and generally do very little. However, a spur of the moment decision at 10am Wednesday morning led to us hopping on a train from Ostia to Rome for a whistle stop tour of the western side of the city. 

Getting back to Moira shattered after our ad hoc visit we resolved to explore Ostia Antica on the Thursday instead and re-attempt the Eastern half of the city on the Friday. Ostia will therefore feature in a different post despite being in a Rome sandwich. 

Rome has earnt its title as the eternal city, presumably since that is roughly how long it would take to see everything in the city! Despite ample historical evidence and cites from it's earliest material evidence in the bronze age through the Roman world, then dark age decline followed by medieval hegemony of Catholicism to early modern irrelevance and finally a modern cultural icon, we knew we could not hope to visit all the sites. What follows is then only the snapshot of Roman history we decided to engage with in our limited time and is predominantly classical. Given this more thematic approach I've put the photos below in chronological order of creation of the sites not when we visited them.

This is classical Rome in seven pictures.

Rome, famously starting life as hilltop settlements on the 7 hills surrounding the river Tiber, grew as independent communities until the various tribes began meeting in the valley between their hills. Initially a swamp and later drained, this area became the Roman Forum. Looking significantly more crowded in this image than the other Fora we have visited, the Forum in Rome was redesigned and added to over the thousand year period when it was most in use. The forum contains some of the oldest evidence of kingship in the city as well, with the famous Lapis Niger engraved rock now at the base of the Arch of Titus on the left. After falling into disuse in the post-imperial period the Forum became a pastoral site for many centuries. From senators, to cows, to tourists someone was always mulling about in this valley for the past three millennium.

The Forum was the site of the confluence of the power of early Roman village, then kingships, then senatorial power under the Roman Republic. However, real political power moved about and when, at the end of the republican period, Julius Caesar tried to steal that power there were violent consequences. This below street level archaeological gem, and also home to a colony of cats, houses the Largo Di Torre Argentina: the most likely place of Caesar's stabbing on the Ides of March 44BC. By complete coincidence we also happened to be there on the Ides of March 2069 years later, although fortunately our visit was much less stabby, regardless of the re-enactment in process in this photo.

The early years of the new Roman Empire saw enormous money flow into Rome and into the hands of a tiny elite, now that the power of the senatorial aristocracy had been shrunken to those in the imperial court. This had the excellent impact, for 21st century visitors, of leading to a massive construction boom including the Pantheon. After weeks of seeing roman ruins all across Italy, Germany, and France, to see the only architecturally sound roman building was deeply impressive. This monumental structure would have been adorned with gold, bronze, and statues but all was removed in the same process that fortunately led to its survival: the subordination of this building to the Catholic Church and its use as a mausoleum.

The money shot. The big man himself. This gargantuan structure of the largest amphitheatre in the world really earns it's title as a wonder of the ancient world. The Colosseum, or the Flavian Amphitheatre as it was known, once had 4 floors all the way around and a cloth roof to be layed out on top to protect the spectators from the sun. While impressive, the medieval historians even thought this had a giant dome on the top as well! What medievalists lack in sources they made up for in craftiness and turned this into a fortress for the medieval Italian wars. Damaged by earthquakes, fires, and its use as a quarry for other Roman buildings, this, the most concentrated killing ground in the world, has survived the test of time exceedingly well.

The emperors in the early Roman Empire needed a suitably impressive tomb for their final resting places and Hadrian provided such with his huge mausoleum used by subsequent emperors as well. Personally the sight of my tomb slowly taking shape across the city would fill me with a sense of existential dread but all power to him. 

Later used as a fortress, the Castel San Angelo, as it has been called since the high medieval period, has a bridge all the way to the Vatican where the popes could, and did, escape in times of crisis. It was here in 1527 that a besieged Pope Clement VII, looking out across a city being ravaged by unpaid mercenaries of the Habsburg Empire looking for their loot, was met by an ambassador to King Henry VIII of England. His request, very simple and easy to grant under normal circumstance, was impossible: annul the marriage of Henry and his attackers beloved aunt. The rest is history.

Late imperial Rome had not lost its love of colossal building projects and Emperor Caracalla was no exception. He constructed the largest baths in the Roman world which today has survived reasonably well. This complex, larger than the Colosseum, could host over 1,600 guests at a time and between 5-6,000 guests daily. Equipped with the trio of Roman baths, a cold Frigidarium, a lukewarm Tepidarium, and a hot Caldarium, a library, amphitheatre, circus, and a 50m swimming pool this was really the king of baths. Likely my favourite site in Rome, it was eventually abandoned when the supplying aqueduct was cut in the mid-6th century and when, in the dismal and apocalyptic atmosphere of post-imperial Rome, there was little need to daily clean 5-6,000 people when the city had shrunk dramatically in size.

While not actually a Roman structure, and thus breaking my rules for the post, I could not complete a post on Rome without mentioning the looming spectre of the heart of Catholicism. The Vatican was built upon the site of Nero's circus and the place of many Christian martyrs including, potentially although not likely, Peter who was said to have been martyred upside down on the spot of the monolith in the middle of the courtyard. The seat of the centre of Christendom since the middle ages and its own state since Italian unification in the late 19th century, this marks our 9th country this trip!

All finished with Rome, or as much as we could do in two days, we made our way down the coast to Pompeii to begin a few days at our southern most point before starting to make the long journey out of Italy towards Venice!