Hail in the Forum

April 17, 2007

Rome, Italy

Today was our first real academic day in Rome, and we spent all of it walking archaeological sites, and going around the Captoline Museum, one of the most famous museums in the city, second only to the Vatican. It was a long day, but the sun was shining and we were all happy to finally be seeing all of the monuments that we had explored over Easter Break.

The first thing we did was to go to the Roman Forum. Jarrett gave us a lecture about the archaic sites in Rome, places that were now buried under as many as 9 meters of accretions. The forum is an incredible mess of buildings, columns in marble, arches and valleys of brick, huge flagstones big enough to accidentally fit a whole foot into, and everything was of monumental proportions, even if it was broken down in its old age.

We stopped and looked at the bases of things, looking at the lowest levels for the oldest of the old, but most of it was built over by new temples with newer shapes and designs, in shiny white marble. We did manage to see the Reglia, or what was left of it, pavestones in the patches of grass. This building was in continuous use for a thousand years and after a few experiments with its layout and plan, it settled into the shape of a broad triangle, very little of which remains besides the low lying stones in the grass. This may have been an administrative storeroom, but not much besides that is known.

Continuing on, we walked all of the way down to the far edge of the forum, right where the back of the Capitoline Museum overlooked the maze of slumped brick, to a place called the lapis niger—a black stone set several feet down into the pavement of the forum and surrounded by a protective wall of stones. Although lots of other stuff is buried underneath the pavement, including the remains of an altar and possibly a shrine to Vulcan, later Roman forgot the original buildings underneath and began to regard the area as a spot of bad luck, and possibly the burial site of Romulus Faustilius, the grandfather of one of the early dynasties in Rome. And we moved on, avoiding some of the larger remains that we would see the following day, and going out of the forum and up, to where underneath a large yellow colored building we could see the corner of smaller foundations sticking out, like a stack of giant books ill aligned.

These rough blocks constituted another once important huge building, called the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, or the Jupiter-who-was-really-really-cool. Lots of buildings in Rome are like this, built upon the shadows of their ancient predecessors, this one is no different. The next set of temples we saw were much the same—walking up over the hill we came down and the road swing and we saw the Temples under St. Omobono, a catholic church that partially obscures the low temple foundations underneath. Not much is known about these temples at all except for the fact that they do exist, and the foundations give a little bit of clues to their plan and orientation. Other than that they just formed little shadows in the grassy enclosure that surrounded them, leaving nothing but a few reminders of their presence.

The next temples we saw, however, had luckily been turned into churches, instead of being built over, and sat in a grassy area within view of the Tiber river, surving in its green swollenness in the stone lined banks, and bounded by many different aged bridges. This was the sight of the former Forum Boarium, the so-called cattle market, which was also home to two spectacularly well preserved Roman temples. They stand next to each other, both in their white austerity, one a circular type now roofed with an odd looking wooden roofed, peaked like a very shallow party hat, and the other a long rectangle of the so-called Italic type, with a few full columns on the deep front porch and the rest built into the walls of the cella itself.

The round one, called the Temple of Nesta, is missing above the column capitals, but what is visible is elaborate scrollwork of Corinthian capitals in fine sparkline white marble, and all of the interior walls are still there. In the bright light of the morning the flutes played in light and shade, and the temple sat in its abruptly truncated splendor in front of a roaring modern street, with the scrolled triangular façade of Catholic churches right across the street. Its juxtapositions like this that we found all over the city.

The rectangular temple nearby was stained dark with pollution, but was preserved all of the way up to the rafters and stood on its high platform, calmly surveying the zooming street in front of it. The temple was beautiful, and the top contained an elaborate frieze of florals, running right above the scrolling capitals. Right across the bridge, we came to yet another site, the Tiber island, one of the few places where the Tiber itself can be crossed. The island was made from the constant deposits of silt made by the Tiber itself slinging around a curve and depositing sand deposit after sand deposit in the same place. Its not very big, but it has been growing every year and over time the Romans decided to use it to house a cult that was imported from Greece after a disastrous plague struck in 291 BC. According to legend, the oracle told the Romans to import the cult of Asklepius, a healing god, whose temple is now obscured by St Bartholomew’s church and a hospital—clearly everyone following these early Romans decided that the island would make a good healing center also.

The island is also the site of two of the oldest bridges over the Tiber. One is the oldest standing bridge, with a single arch in the middle of the rushing water, and another arch that goes from the island to the far bank, which is called the Pons Fubricus and is the oldest functional bridge in Rome, dating to 62 BC. Because the two spans of the bridges come out from the sides of the long and narrow island, the ancient Romans thought the island itself looked like a big ship, and carved the tip of the island into the shape of a prow, complete with the snakes of Asklepius on the prow as a part of the figurehead. The prow has subsequently been topped with a police station, and has been silted in with the gradual build up of sand, but walking down near the shoreline we could see the clean lines in the Travertine stone.

But the day was not even close to being over, and after stopping to enjoy the brilliant sunlight and a view down the Tiber and through the old arches of the bridges, we moved on, up back across the river to see our next set of temples.

These temples were arranged in a grand set of three—victory temples each constructed by a different general promising that if he won a certain battle he would construct a temple in thanks to his favorite god. Rome was expanding, and won a good deal of battles in the 4th and 3rd Centuries BC, and so many of the generals came back victorious. Sometimes they would erect a couple of temples side by side, expanding from a victory temple to an entire unified complex, which is exactly what happened in this complex of three that have been incorporated into the modern church of St Nicholas.

The outer colonnades of the outer two temples have been incorporated into the church walls, emerging like an exoskeleton from the flesh of the church walls. The central temple has been completely incorporated, and the rest of the flanking temples sit exposed, like wings extending on each side from the body of the church and left to dry in the sun. The other three walls of the outer temples have suffered from time—they stand in broken colonnades and short foundation walls, sticking up out of the sea of wildflowers that surround the church. However, the inside of the church has places where the stucco has been removed, revealing the inside edges of the temple colonnades, supporting the newer building. Other than that, the interior of the church looked rather normal—three aisles separated by columns pillaged from other buildings; mismatched columns parading down to the aspe and the altar at the far end. The entire inside was gilded and painted, not all over in panels of blue like the Byzantine churches, but edged at the lines of the building and curved in the dome of the apse, where frescoes showed scenes of the divine family with flowing garments picked out in gold edging.

Nearing the apse, we walked down to right in front of the altar and descended a narrow staircase underneath the church floor, emerging in the dark and cramped aisles of the subterranean passages. A woman from the church led us on the tour, pointing out in her sing-song accented English “here you see the temple of Juno, 194 years Before Christ, columns Corinthian and foundations here….” We wandered around, following her song as we watched the walls of the church rise up out of the bases of the old temples, vaulted and segmented in brick arches. We wandered around for a good while, as we entered the bodies of each of the temples and stepped into the imaginary space in between now covered with the floor of the church, before moving onto the next temple, in and out of the shadows of history all around us.

And then it was back into the light of the sun and onto our next stop, the theater of Marcellus, embedded into the walls of a nearby apartment complex, part of a building that originally held 20,000 people and now is full of extra walls and floors to make it a place for people. The modern windows poke out of the top of the curved arch substructure, faced with travertine and resembling in form and construction the Colosseum. Next to it, standing all alone, are three reconstructed columns from the original temple of Apollo Medicus Sogianus, which were moved by Mussolini as a part of a “lets showcase Rome” project. This is part of some of the most extravagant building periods in Rome, when the columns had fluting of alternating sizes, elaborate scrolls in the column capitals and bases, and a superstructure of every different type of floral imaginable. The corner stands, what is left of it, proud to be where it is, and boldly indifferent to the fact that it is completely out of its original location. We stood and took pictures, and then marched on in the heat of the early afternoon.

Then it was a lunch break, once we had reached the place of the Largo Argentina, a piazza with the central feature of not one, but four temple platforms sitting side by side in the pavement. We sat in a bench by the sun and had our sandwiches, and a gust of wind brought a local newspaper flying our way. We picked it up; another nuisance a big city, and were about to throw it away when I noticed the front page. It was a huge picture of police carrying out a person with bloodstained legs and the headline which read something about shooting and the USA. It was Virginia Tech, splashed across the front pages of the newspapers. We were more than a little unsettled that it had made it as far as the front pages of the free newspapers that they hand out on the way to the metro, but there it was, plain as day.

We all clustered around Vincoli as he tried to read the Italian article, and while it basically repeated everything that we had learned the night before in our frantic attempt to receive any news, it still unsettled us. We had a brief lecture about the four temples, which were much of the same—temples vowed to be built if the god were to be kind enough to let the general win the given battle he is fighting. If the general did win, the spoils of war were used to construct a temple befitting thanks to that particular god. In this instance, 4 different gods of unknown name were thanked by various generals, resulting in a complex of 3 rectangular and one circular temple, all dedicated and built at different times but later incorporated into one complex.

By this time, however, we were all incredibly tired and ready to go, so we did not spend much time looking at the ancient ruins of foundations here… we walked out of the square and kept going toward one of the most famous museums in Rome, the Capitoline Museums. The entire complex was designed and modified by Michelangelo, with a wide and shallow flight of steps leading up to three Renaissance looking gold buildings surrounding a wide plaza with the grand statue of Marcus Aurelius in the center. Rathen impressive. There were throngs and throngs of people milling around but we were ready to go see the inside of the museum.

This museum contains some of the best finds from around the Greek and Roman world, statues such as the Dying Gaul, a young barbarian distinguished by the massive torc around his neck and his thick thatch of hair, in a state of utter exhaustion, his fallen weapons and shield scattered undearneath him. Elsewhere were the fragments of a colossal statue of Constantine, of which the head and arm are the only thing still in existence, sitting in a wall in the courtyard, surveying our liliputian group as we walked around, barely coming up to the great head’s nostrils. Other great works in the museum included an Aphrodite coming out of the bath, modestly covering herself with her hands as she emerged from the water. The museum was huge, filled to the brim with marble statuary.

We wandered throughout the tall, echoing halls and drawing bits and pieces of the bronzes and the marbles. The walls were not left blank either—they were filled with huge renaissance era paintings depicting scenes both mythological and biblical. Some people went back early, but I stayed for hours and hours, walking among familiar and unfamiliar sculpture. As I was walking from one wing of the museum down underground to the next, I heard a tremendous crash outside and a boom. Emerging out of the back of the museum, I came to the part where the Capitoline Museum overlooked the Forum, and saw a tremendous hailstorm coming down upon the ruins, pinging off of the ancient brick and marble structures. It was a spectacular sight—the magnificence of nature and the old glories of the ancient city, merged in a single shining moment that I could view safely from the wings of the museum. It was positively wonderful, and I sat and watched it for a long time, as the small balls of ice pinging down.

We finally emerged from the museum at 6:00, utterly tired but exhilarated by what we had seen, coming back to the hotel to eat, do some reading and sleep. We had another long day ahead of us.