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Sam. 03 Sep 2005, 09:06
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Think visiting the Colosseum is a great way to dig into Rome's rich history ? That's barely scratching the surface. Head underground for a deeper appreciation of the real Eternal City.
PORTA MAGGIORE, LIKE MANY OF ROME'S BIG SQUARES, verges on anarchy. Herds of Fiats and buzz-saw mopeds merge with Mediterranean bravado, dodging the trams and buses crisscrossing the piazza. Romans walk unconcernedly though the mayhem or gather in open-air bars at its borders to chat and watch the whirlwind. An ancient aqueduct runs along the edge of the square, its brick archways hairy with windborne weeds, traffic swirling around the thinning legs. Surrounded by this aggressive modernity the waterway seems utterly out of place and irrelevant - a useless relic, an obstacle, a dead reminder from a world lung gone.
Yet if you walk to No. 13 on the piazza, pry up the manhole cover in the sidewalk, and descend into the suddenly muffled and damp darkness, you will see a different side to Porra Maggiore. Six meters below ground, your flashlight beam glides along whitewashed corridors lined with funerary niches, each hand-painted with the name of its occupant: HILARI, PETRONI ... This is the columbarium of Patlacius Maximus. one of many ancient Roman cemeteries that underlie the whole neighborhood. From here, worn stone stairs lead down to a lower level where, if you strain to hear, the traffic throbs faintly like a distant heartbeat. The smell of moss permeates the air, and the glare and flurry of the surface are quickly forgotten.
Beneath the streets and squares of modern Rome is a hidden realm of silence, stillness, and age. An entire, city lies buried here: temples, bath complexes, apartment buildings and brothels, huge stadiums and fire stations and public latrines. Rome's above-ground monuments have been ravaged by smog. the elements, and the steady chiseling of people. But down in the darkness, under a thick protective blanket of earth, bright goddesses still dance on the walls of imperial palaces, and graffiti records the prayers and curses of people dead 2,000 years.
How the classical city came to be buried is a story in its own right. The Romans themselves, always eager to build but chronically short of space in their crowded capital, began the process. Roman architects simply tore the roofs off many structures and packed them with earth to form the foundations of new buildings. Hadrian built his Temple of Venus and Rome atop a bath complex, and Constantine raised St. Peter's basilica over a pagan necropolis. After the Great Fire of AD. 64, Nero buried large sections of Republican Rome under the rubble; atop the landfill, he built an enormous palace and garden complex called the Domus Aurea (Golden House). When Nero died, his villa suffered a similar fate: Vespasian built the Colosseum over its lake and gardens, and Trajan erected his baths on a wing of the palace.
During the wars, plagues, and famines of the Middle Ages, Rome was transformed. The worlds greatest city which at its height boasted a million or more inhabitants, shrank away to a village of perhaps 15,000 souls. The population contracted to small pockets within the broad ring of the imperial city walls, and Nature reclaimed the rest. Forests grew within the once-urban area inside the walls; crumbling baths and temples became the home of wild animals and, it was said, of demons. Tiber floodwaters spread layer upon layer of alluvial mud over the ancient city, earthquakes toppled lofty stonework, wind and rain wore away the high ground and filled in low-lying areas. The ground level rose like the tide. The valley of the Forum, sacred heart of classical Rome, was entombed in 20 meters of silt and became known as the Campo Vaccino (Cow Pasture), where farmers tended their herds.
This is how Montaigne found the Forum during his visit to Rome in 1580: columns and triumphal arches wading waist-deep in the earth. "An ancient Roman could not recognize the site of his city even if he saw it," he observed. "It is easy to see that many [original] streets are more than 30 feet below those of today." Montaigne was not the first to feel the pull of the underground city. Already a century earlier, Renaissance artists interested in classical antiquity had been called by Pope Sixtus IV to decorate his new Sistine Chapel and had found their way into Nero's Domus Aurea. Carrying torches and sketchbooks and wineskins, they crawled down into the half-buried palace to marvel at the brilliant frescoes of dwarves, nymphs, and mythological monsters. (Even today the autographs of Filippino Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Parmigiamno, and other Renaissance masters are legible on the rail ceiling, which was just above their heads in the dirt-filled palace.) They emerged from le grotte (grottoes), as the place became known, to paint Rome's churches and palaces in a new "grotesque" style.
The underground city soon yielded up other marvels - famed classical statues such as the Apollo del Belvedere and the Laocoon that inspired Michelangelo and generations of artists. Across the river at St. Peters, where Consrantine's original basilica was being rebuilt, the long-forgotten pagan necropolis under the cathedral came gradually to light. At the height of the Prorestant Reformation, horrified popes watched a steady procession of pagan gods emerge from the earth beneath Catholicism's holiest shrine.
The underworld continued to fuel Rome's artistic imagination - and feed its nightmares - for centuries. Yet, it was only in 1870 that people began to piece together a coherent picture of underground Rome. In that year Rome became capital of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy, triggering a construction boom that laid bare large swatches of old Rome. An early generation of archaeologists clambered in and out of trenches in their top hats and swallow-tailed coats, documenting hundreds of sites before they were covered over once more. Their maps and notes for the first time brought to light the wonderfully complex layering of the Roman subsoil.
VISITING THE SUBTERRANEA TODAY, YOU CAN SEE these strata one by one, as you descend slowly into the past. In San Clemente, a striking 12th-century basilica near the Colosseum, stairs off the right-hand aisle lead downward to a dim hall painted with fading Byzantine saints. This is the original, fourth-century San Clemente, over which the present church was built. More stairs lead to a deeper level, with a second-century apartment building and another well-preserved house of worship - this one a temple to the pagan god Mithras, the Iranian god of light and truth who was Christ's bitter rival during the later empire. These structures, in turn, rest upon the huge tufa blocks of a still earlier structure, perhaps a mint, destroyed during the Great Fire. Here, 12 meters below the surface, the stone is cold to the touch, damp with deep-earth humidity. In the silence, all you hear is the faint trickle of water still flowing through original Roman pipes. No one has excavated below this level, but something lies buried here, for the tufa walls run another seven meters down into the earth.
Much of Rome is layered in this way. Rome's Renaissance city hall on the Capitoline Hill sits atop the Tabulanum, the public record office of Republican Rome, which in turn rests on the Temple of Veiovis, one of Rome's earliest gods. Beneath the podium of this venerable temple, excavators found evidence of a still-older shrine. The nearby Palazzo Caffarelli conceals the Temple of Capitoline Jove, pagan Rome's holiest of holies; below it, in March of 1998, earlier foundations were uncovered, probably of the original sixth-century B.C. Temple of Jove, built in mud brick, wood, and terra cotta when Rome was still a small town ruled by Etruscan kings. Another case study in Roman stratigraphy, Neros Domus Aurea, opened to the public in 1999. The rolling gardens of the Oppian Hill overlie the Baths of Trajan; descending through the foundations of these baths into a vast labyrinth of halls, monumental fountains, and colonnades was Neros private domain. Here and there are signs of earlier buildings - the protruding wall of a grain warehouse, the black-and-white mosaic floor of a simple home - over which Nero's architects built the palace.
The quiet and seclusion of such places make the distant past seem eerily tangible. In the cavernous rooms of the Domus Aurea, once gleaming with rare marbles and gemstones, one senses the sheer scale of Neros madness, while the frescoes kindle the excitement of Renaissance artists who stood here 15 centuries later. In the necropolis beneath St. Peters, you walk where the Apostle Peter is said to have been buried after his martyrdom in A.D. 64 and where Constantine, the first Christian emperor, built his great basilica 250 years later.
Rome's above-ground monuments have been ravaged by smog, the elements, and the steady chiseling of people. But down in the darkness, bright goddesses still dance on the walls of imperial palaces, and graffiti records the prayers and curses of people dead 2,000 years.
The restaurant Da Pancrazio near the Campo de' Fiori is built into the Theater of Pompey whose opus reticulata walls and gargantuan marble columns surround you as you eat. Knowing that Julius Caesar was murdered here, the tiramisu tastes that much richer.
Yet there is more here than the deeds of emperors and apostles. The humble voices of nameless Romans are heard as well. The building at Via delta VII Corte, 9, in the Trascevere region, stands above a barracks of the Roman fire brigade, with its sleeping quarters, larder, latrine, and chapel of genius excubitorii, the divinity who protected firemen. On the wall of this chapel, in the firemen's own rough hands, excavators found salutes to the emperor, thanks to the gods for narrow escapes, and random remarks and doodles made during rest hours. "I am weary," one overworked fireman wrote near the end of his tour of duty. "Send my replacement."
The monumental tomb of Aulus Hirnus, Julius Caesar's brave lieutenant, now stands in the flooded basement of the Palazzo della Cancellena. On its outer wall, anonymous Roman passers-by wrote a variety of messages, every bit as crude and ingenious as modern-day graffiti. "Scummy Ready-for-Anvthing gives it to her lovers all the time," one penned in near Latin capitals. "Crap well," someone else wrote jusc beside, either as a response or a general exhortation to future readers.
Most Roman landmarks have their subterranea. The Italian Senate building sits on the Baths of Alexander, the House of Represenratives above the sepulchers of the Antonines. Beneath the Colosseum is a maze of rooms where gladiatorial combats and lavish venationes (hunting spectacles) were prepared. Below this, archaeologists have found the skulls of tigers, giraffes, bears, and other wild animals that died in the shows, as well as chicken bones, hazelnuts, and seeds on which the spectators snacked.
Yet even unknown places frequently harbor unique remains. Trapdoors in the courtyard of an apartment block in Via Taranto open onto beautifully preserved graves of the second century. Fresco roses and divinities are still bright on the walls. In the basement of the house at Via di Campo Marzio, 48, huge travertine slabs are inset with Greek letters of polished bronze - part of an enormous sundial that Augustus erected in 10 B.C., using an Egyptian obelisk as a pointer. Below the train tracks near Termini station is a mysterious chapel decorated with elegant stucco scenes of heavenly deliverance - Orpheus leading Eurydice back from Hades, Ganymede flying aloft to become the cup-bearer of Zeusâ - that were sacred to an obscure Neopythagorean cult.
KNOWING ABOUT UNDERGROUND ROME, YOU BEGIN to recognize the ancient shapes that have molded the modern. The uniform curve of the buildings along Via di Groccapinia suggests a structure, and soon you discover it: the great semicircular wall of the Theater of Pompey. Piazza Navona is perhaps Rome's most perfect square, a graceful long promenade of fountains and ivy-clad palaces ending in a neat semicircle. Its smooth lines and precise north-south orientation seem too perfect to be accidental, and in fact, they are: Piazza Navona grew straight out of the walls of Domitians Stadium. In cellars around the square, the ruins are visible where 30,000 spectators once enjoyed Greek-style sporting events performed by nude athletes. You soon work out certain subterranean ground rules.
Roads that run between antique monuments, like the Via dei Cerchi that slips between the Circus Maximus and the Palatine Hill, or the Via Labicana that joins the Colosseum with the gladiatorial barracks of the Ludus Magnus, are likely to follow original Roman roadways and to be lined with buned sites. Small hills not mentioned by Roman authors, often called "Monti," are prime suspects: Monte Citorio, Monte Giordano, Monte Testaccio, Monte della Farina, and Monte dei Cenci all grew up around ancient structures. Low-lying neighborhoods beside the Tiber, prone to regular flooding, are likewise rich in subterranea. Better still are regions like the Campo Marzio, a horn-shaped bend in the left bank of the Tiber, which have been continuously inhabited since classical times and were thus spared the ravages of deep modern foundations.
On the same principle, churches have the best subterranea of all. Many a crypt and chapel has a stairway leading down to a private house, a prison, a tannery, a brothel, and much else. A surprising number of churches were built over pagan temples, whether simply to occupy the holy ground of other religions or in accord with some deeper geography of the sacred. San Nicola in Carcere rests atop the temples of Juno and Janus, while Santa Maria sopra Minerva, as its name suggests, sits on the Temple of Minerva Chalcidica.
Numerous other churches conceal temples to Mithras. These snug cave-like halls have flanking benches where worshipers reclined and a statue at the back wall of Mithras plunging his sword into the neck of a bull. Here, by the flickering light of oil lamps, worshipers underwent secret initiation ceremonies, including a blood baptism and simulated death meant to cleanse their souls of earthly impurity. Spend much time in Roma sotterranea, and its strange rites and shadowy images will work their way into your dreams.
Underground Rome enters the lives of certain people in a more tangible way. In October of 1987 a car broke through the pavement of Via San Giosafat on the Aventine and fell, passengers and all, into a 15-meter Roman gallery. Now and then, cars, trees, even buildings collapse into unknown subterranea, and a new piece of the underground city is revealed. When this happens, city authorities call Marco Placidi, a 34-year-old spelunker and self-taught archaeologist who is Rome's official cave-in sleuth. Placidi and his team hurry to the scene, don climbing harnesses and helmets with headlamps, and lower into the void. "These days there aren't too many new frontiers left to explore," he says. "But Roma sotterranea is one - it is the great unknown." Afterward the team prepares a detailed report of its findings, with a three-dimensional computer model of the site.
Placidi is a small, round-shouldered man with the unruffled, almost bored manner of a native Roman. But get him going about his explorations and his eyes glitter, his speech accelerates, and he peppers you with data about the geology, biology, history, and archaeology of underground Rome. His special passion is buried passageways, the aqueducts, catacombs, quarries, and access tunnels that honeycomb the subsoil. He once crawled a six-kilometer stretch of the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct that passes under central Rome, popping up occasionally through manholes along the route to get his bearings. "It was incredible to see all the activity up there, the people walking around under the blue sky, and then return to the world of peace and solitude right under their feet."
Freud suggested that Rome and the human mind have much in common. Just as the submerged, dimly sensed contours of the mind can I shape conscious realities, so a buried stadium alters your sense of Piazza Navona, and a Mithraic shrine far below changes the tenor of your meditations in the basilica above.
This link between the upper and lower cities fascinates him. While investigating the Roman quarries under a convent near the Spanish Seeps, he found the life-size marble statue of a Greek Muse. The memory of the statue, he learned, was preserved in an age-old legend, still familiar co the nuns, that a marble idol of Satan had been buried there long ago. Rome is sometimes haunted by its subterranea.
The undisputed master of underground Rome is Carlo Pavia, photographer and raconteur, who in 23 years of exploration has seen more of the lower city than anyone else alive. He has scuba-dived downward into narrow wells filled with poisonous, pitch-black water, slithered into communal graves to probe the deepest foundations of medieval churches, and had close encounters with the strange albino creatures that inhabit the deepest recesses. By now he is something of a celebrity and is regularly invited by Roman dignitaries to have a look under their palazzi. Yet the calls that seem to excite him most come from unknown Romans who have heard what he does and want to show him what lies beneath their homes. Pavia and I met for dinner last summer. Afterward he had a late-night rendezvous with an anonymous man who wanted Pavias opinion of some antique amphorae he had found in his basement. "First I'll see the amphorae, and then I'll talk the guy into showing me the basement," Pavia said with a childlike grin. "Who knows what I may find?"
Pavia prides himself on his ability to locate unknown subterranea with old-fashioned techniques. "Modern archaeologists rely on computer modeling, echo soundings, geo-radar, and other high-tech methods. Yet they don't get the results I do." Pavias approach is more traditional. In the manner of Heinrich Schliemann, the great German archaeologist who discovered Troy through a close reading of the Iliad, Pavia relies on documents: Nineteenth-century excavation notes, Renaissance drawings, and classical Roman texts all yield vital clues. Once he has pinpointed a site, he uses his mastery of the Roman psyche to gain access. Romans are typically hesitant to show ruins beneath their houses, fearing eviction if word gets out. To win them over, Pavia has taken solemn oaths of secrecy, badgered and wheedled and schmoozed. He has courted young ladies that he found unattractive for months in order to coax information out of them. In some cases, like his recent discovery of the Temple of Juno Regina in the Jewish quarter known as Il Ghetto, he has patiently knocked on the same door for 20 years before it has opened to him at last.
When he finally convinced Signora Rosa, the elderly lady whose house conceals the Temple of Juno, to admit him, the results were worth the wait. Three majestic fluted columns, still bearing the original marble entablature, were visible in the fourth-floor attic; floor by floor he followed them down through the kitchen, the dining room, and the study to the apartments below. When Pavia asked permission to visit the cellar where the columns led, Rosa handed him the keys. "You will have to go alone," she said.
There in the dark, dusty cellar, he found the columns standing firm on the original podium of the temple. Pavia was so absorbed in his notes and measurements that he did not hear Rosa enter behind him and sit at the top of the stairs. He only noticed her when he turned to leave. I haven't been down here for 50 years" she said, eyes brimming with tears. She explained that her family had often taken refuge in this basement during the fall of 1943, when the Ghetto was raided by occupying Nazi troops. Rosa was absent during the last raid, when the Nazis found her family and deported them to the notorious Austrian concentration camp of Mauthausen. They never returned, and Rosa had never again found the courage to enter the cellar. Now, following Carlo down the dim stairway into the ancient temple beneath her home - her own private underworld - she exorcised the demons of her past.
Sigmund Freud once suggested that Rome and the human mind have much in common. Just as Rome grew through successive phases, he said, each rising on the one before, so the layers of the mind evolve one out of another and are shaped by what lies beneath. Freud's inspired analogy helps explain the fascination of Roma sotterranea, why knowing about it transforms the surface city. Just as the submerged, dimly sensed contours of the mind can shape conscious realities, so a buried stadium permanently alters your sense of Piazza Navona, and a Mithraic shrine far below changes the tenor of your meditations in San Clemente.
When at last you climb back into the sunlight of the Porta Maggiore, the living city has a new solemnity, and the aqueduct, pillars rooted firmly in what lies below, seems to fit. No longer the withered vestige of a long-dead past, you see it sprout fresh and strong from the rich soil of Roman history. And the frenetic human activity of the surface seems like the play of light and shadow over its ancient facade.
Details, Details, Details / For would-be explorers and armchair subterraneophiles alike, there are two important resources. Carlo Pavia's Underground Rome, a bilingual Italian and English guidebook just published this September, covers more than a hundred major sites including his latest explorations (available via the Italian internet bookstore <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.zivago.com">www.zivago.com</a><!-- w -->). Another excellent tool is Marco Placidis bilingual Italian and English Web site <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.underome.com">www.underome.com</a><!-- w -->, a gold mine of information on all aspects of subterranean Rome. It provides a virtual tour of dozens of key sites, late-breaking news on recent discoveries, and links to tour groups specializing in the underground (see below). Don't be fooled by the scruffy English translations - this is 24-karat data.
Four of Rome's best underground sites are also among the easiest to visit. For Nero's Domus Aurca a reservation is recommended, though it is sometimes possible to visit on a walk-in basis (Tel: 39-06-39967700; admission: 10,000 lire). Its a good idea to take a guided tour (a variety of languages are offered), though a self-guided tour is possible. San Clemente's underground layers, on the other hand, may be seen on your own at any time during normal church hours (Tel: 39-06-70451018; admission: 5,000 lire). A fascinating example of Rome's many historical layers, and of the forces that buried classical Rome. is the Crypta Balbi (Tel: 39-06-6780167; admission: 8,000 lire), whose two above-ground layers were opened to the public in April 2000 and whose third underground level was just opened in August. The site has an excellent self-guided tour through the ruins (the underground level is still by reservation only), a state-of-the-art museum, and a fine guidebook published by Electa in several languages. The remarkable necropolis beneath St. Peters can only be seen with a guided tour, booked in advance via fax or e-mail through the Ufficio Scavi (Excavation Office, Tel: 39-06-69885318, Fax: 39-06-69885518, e-mail <!-- e --><a href="mailto:uff.scavi@fabbricsp.va">uff.scavi@fabbricsp.va</a><!-- e -->; admission: 15,000 lire).
Many of Romes other underground remains are best seen with an organized tour, both for the commentary of the trained archaeologist that leads them and because the necessary permits are often difficult and time-consuming to secure. Among the best groups specializing in underground visits are Genti e Paesi (Tel: 39-06-85301755, Fax: 39-06-85301757 e-mail <!-- e --><a href="mailto:ilsogno@romeguide.it">ilsogno@romeguide.it</a><!-- e -->), Palladio (Tel: 39-06-6867897 Fax: 39-06-68132259, e-mail <!-- e --><a href="mailto:palladio@srd.it">palladio@srd.it</a><!-- e -->), and Itinera (Tel/Fax: 39-06-27800785). The Rome city council also offers a wide range of tours in Italian by trained archaeologists (see <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.romacultura.net">www.romacultura.net</a><!-- w --> for scheduled sites). Several other tour groups are listed in the "Visits" section of Marco Placidis Web site.
Tom Mueller lives in Italy, where he is completing a novel set in - and under - Rome. His research has earned him bale skin, translucent hair, and eyes that glow in the dark.
HEMISPHERE - In-flight magazine for United Airlines
November 2000
