Imperial Forum and Ostia

April 22, 2007

Rome, Italy

Yesterday was another longish day for us, and I think that everyone is starting to get burned out with all of the traveling, the crowds and the heat. I could not focus at all wherever we went and only recovered in time to go to the mass last night at the Pantheon, which was fortunate because I would have sincerely regretted only being half awake at that experience.

During the day we went to the Imperial Forum, which was a series of public spaces added under Caesar and later emperors to expand public space in the center of the city. Unfortunately, most of it is now covered by the modern road plowed through by Mussolini, looking for a way to link the Colosseum at the end of a big road to the other great monuments of the city, and obliterated everything in his way. As a result, the forums might have columns or walls here and there on either side of the huge road, but not much else.

On the opposite end of the forum was the other famous column of the Roman period, the Column of Trajan, upon which the column of Marcus Aurelius is modeled, with smaller and lower bands of relief showing his two greatest campaigns against the barbarians. The column was originally topped with a statue of Trajan himself, but in the later periods this was replaced with a bronze of some saint or another, which still exists today. Some of the bottom was encased in scaffolding, but the building itself was quite impressive—a massive width and a huge white shaft standing high above all of the other buildings in the remains of the forum. We walked around this column, down into the one part of the forum that was still preserved: a honeycomb of arches and vaults all done in brick.

This part of the forum was actually called Trajan’s Markets, and although it abutted the forum, in antiquity it did not actually connect. However, the walls separating the more commercial parts of the forum from the rest of the place have since fallen in, revealing a massive hemicycle of brick facing. The Markets look like an inverted Colosseum—several stories of arched colonnades looking outward from a concave curve—over 150 shops carved out of the side of the hill on the back of the forum. This structure was huge and very impressive—we got to walk inside the tall arched vaulting and admire the uniform rows of brick work as it swung around in a massive arc. It was cool on the inside, and the shops, now long empty, stood barren and shadowed in the early afternoon light.

It was around 2:00, and I was so tired I could barely keep one foot in front of the other. After the presentation had finished on the markets, I walked over on the other side of the forum to inspect an exhibition that I had considered visiting, one on Marc Chagall, a 20th century artist. However, the cost of the museum was incredibly high, and I was so tired that I knew I would be unable to appreciate the artwork, however fine it was. So, I decided to walk back toward the Colosseum to take the metro home.

I arrived back at the hotel just in time to watch an episode of Desperate Housewives and catch up a little bit on my blog (as you can see by the lateness of this entry, I am still way behind), and tried to take a nap. Just as I was about to nod off, Jess Eisenberg excitedly burst into the room, panting from the effort to get there in time, and asked if everyone had left to go to the mass in the Pantehon. Since I was planning on going, I replied that no, everyone had not, and after struggling to rise to my feet, I put back on my shoes, grabbed a scarf to cover my shoulders, and walked into the hall, where Vincoli and Scott were waiting. We took the number 84 bus as close as we could get to the Pantheon, and walked the rest of the way there, racing the clock to arrive on time.

But arrive we did, coming into the plaza just in time to stop and appreciate the weathered façade of the great building, the portico with its immortal insciption of Marcus Agrippa across the top, and the massive widely spaced columns leading into a huge door that opened onto the even bigger space of the dome, lavishly enriched with the marble that the outside completely lacked—all fancy stone had been stripped sometime in the middle ages, leaving the rough brick on the rotunda, and a series of holes—puncture wounds, on the pediment of the porch where the statues used to be.

We walked through the slanting afternoon light and the bustling noise of the street before coming into the relative calm of the Pantheon, still swarming with tourists. We took our seats in the folding chairs past the ropes, and settled in to wait until the mass began. The mass itself was long but very beautiful, conducted completely in Italian and Latin, so none of us understood much, but the magic of the moment and of the place struck us all. I looked around at the beautiful statuary and the magnificent dome, unsurpassed in its scope and majesty, and when the priest began to sing series after series of arpeggioed hallelujahs I could not help but feel moved.

We all emerged from the mass feeling incredibly elated, and stepped out from that sanctuary back into the real world. I wanted to let the feeling stay with me, so I didn’t talk much for the first few minutes, holding the memories of the echoing hymns close to the chest until the real world intruded too far and I was forced to return to the practicality of what to do next. So we decided to get gelato, of course, moving up the street on the side of the Pantheon to a famous gelateria that had over 100 flavors. Already having maxed out my gelato quota for the day, I opted for some gummis instead, but Scott, Chris and Jess all got some, and let me try a bit as we meandered our way over to the Trevi Fountain.

The Trevi fountain looked even more lovely in the fading light of the afternoon, the water bubbling out of the niches, supervised closely by the imposing figure of Triton, striding over the rocks on the backs of fierce dolphins. It was not nearly as mobbed as it was the day that Lily and I visited, and we had less of a problem getting down to the water this time. I threw in another coin, a fervent wish to return to Rome again, and we stood gazing at the burbling water before we finally walked back to the nearet metro, and returned to the hotel, just in time to share our experiences with the group. Some folks had gone to the Opera that night, and told us their stories about how it was. We hung out for a while, talking and comparing notes before turning in.

The next day was a long travel day; we had to take the metro all of the way out of Rome to Ostia, which was the ancient Roman harbor. The shoreline has silted up since then, and Ostia Antica is a good few kilometers inland from the beach now, but we spotted lots of Europeans in their bathing attire, headed out to the beach. We all listened to our iPods or read as the train sped out of the city and into the rolling hills, before dropping us off in a wooded park complete with fragmented walls and scattered marble.

Ostia was a huge town in antiquity—virtually every good that went to Rome went through the port first, and two emperors carved harbors directly out of the earth—Claudius digging a shallow one that turned out to be very dangerous for the ships, and Trajan digging a regular hexagonal harbor that was much deeper and more sheltered, protecting the ships from the wind and waves that turned the other harbor into a graveyard.

The town contained a large number of public baths, including the Baths of Neptune, a large complex with some wonderful black and white mosaics with the god leading a quartet of horses, mermaids and dolphins arcing in the white tesserae. We walked around the fragments of walls that surrounded the mosaics, climbing up to view them from the top, and coming around and down to walk amongst the walls.

Then we were off, to the next place—the barracks of the firemen. It was growing hot, and the red bricks rose up to our necks and surrounded us. Jarrett gave us an assignment, to figure out what the function of the building was, so we spread out, walking in and out of ancient rooms, peering over walls and through windows, some of us deciphering inscriptions set into ancient blocks of marble. I entered a curious room with high brick walls and a floor completely surrounded on four sides by a deeply cut channel about a foot wide, the rest of the floor rising up in an island around it. Underneath was a tunnel, presumably to lead the water from wherever it was to here, and walking back along the narrow paths to the wide open space where we started the trip, we noticed tall cisterns for water and a set of steps decorated with marble and littered with what looked like statue bases.

Jarrett told us that this was, indeed, a barracks that surrounded a central courtyard, and the curious appearance of all of the water was so that the community firemen could practice putting out fires. The set of steps and marble decoration facing onto the courtyard was a small shrine to the emperor, and there were in addition two sets of toilets, one public and one private. Evidently the firemen were kind of a big deal in antiquity.

And as the day wore on, we saw many of the areas of the ancient town. We saw what amounted to an ancient shopping mall—the so-called Piazzali de la Corporazoni, an open square lined with stalls for everything from ropemakers to fruit sellers. Each of the shop types was indicated by the image inlaid in mosaic in the floor. At the back of this square was a theater, a small one dedicated by Caracalla and so inscribed in a huge plaque on the sides of the seating area. We stopped there for lunch, and when we were finished, the bravest of us ventured down to the stage to enact something for the benefit of everyone there. Katie went down and read a selection of The Wasteland, by TS Eliot, and Sam graced us with a song, sung with much reluctance but sung well.

After the break, we took a brief stop by the Mithraeum, the site of a mystery cult in the Roman empire, one centering on this eastern sun god, who was worshipped in a cave like setting by the sharing of a ritual meal among his followers. The walls of this strange temple were bounded by low seating, and the far end contained a carved medallion with the god himself, cloak flying behind him, surrounded on one side by a great bull.

Finally, we visited an ancient taverna and the Roman version of a tenement building—evidence for city housing, buildings several stories high surrounding a communal courtyard and garden, before, tired and more than a little sunburned, we took a long walk back to the metro station and endured a rather unpleasant hot and sweaty ride back to Rome. Stewart and I and Scott all got off at the Spanish Steps—I had lost my pair of sandals a while back and my feet were screaming for air, so we found a Northface store and I bought a pair of turqoise flip flops and Scott a pair of heavier sandals with several straps. He was so happy about his purchase that I think he sung the whole way home.

We still got home when it was light outside, so I decided to combat the worst of my fatigue by going for a run, venturing out of the hotel and to a nearby park and villa, complete with an art museum (which I did not visit in my sweaty state, but would have liked to), a crumbling romantic temple-like structure, an obelisk, and sweeping hills of vegetation. I ran around this park for a while, weaving up and down the paths and in and out of groups of people lounging in the late afternoon cool. I greeted other runners on the paths, happy to finally see exercising Europeans, a rarity over here. It felt great to be doing something athletic again, and my run was further extended when I got a little bit lost on the way home and ended jogging over to the next stop on the metro before realizing that I was heading the wrong direction and turning around, getting back to the hotel much later than I said I would picnic.

Still, I managed to have a great little salad for dinner, and Ambrice and Chris and Jess Bradshaw and Jess Eisenberg and I chatted for a long time about the trip and how close it was to being over, surprised that all our travels would come to an end soon, but happy that the madness would end as well. Being in such a small group with such an eccentric professor for so long is never easy. And then I had a much needed, but wonderful shower, before reading more of my new Caravaggio book and heading off to bed.

I had meant to go to bed early to get a bunch of sleep before the Vatican the next day, but Jess Bradshaw ended up coming in and talking to me for a long time, and when she left I was almost settled into sleep, but Katie, who I was rooming with, came in and we ended up having a long heart to heart until my answers faded to grunts and then to whispers and silence.