EAHN: Virtual Tour 4/09: A Walk through Old Rome

Arch of Constantine, Rome, dedicated 315
Photograph: EAHN

Arch of Constantine, detail of attic with sculpture plundered from earlier monuments
Photograph: EAHN

The Clivus Scauri leading up the Caelian Hill
Photograph: EAHN

Frescoed room in the Roman houses on the Clivus Scauri
Photograph: EAHN

Venus fresco at the well for the Roman houses on the Clivus Scauri
Photograph: Case Romane del Celio

Santi Giovanni e Paolo, apse, with twelfth-century arcade
Photograph: EAHN

Santi Giovanni e Paolo, dedicated 398, with twelfth-century entrance portico and bell tower
Photograph: EAHN

The Temple of Claudius (Claudianum), with rusticated masonry
Photograph: Wikimedia Commons

Nero’s nymphaeum underneath the Temple of Claudius
Photograph: Wikimedia Commons

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carcere XVI (“Pier with Chains”), second state, 1761
Photograph: Wikimedia Commons

Arco di Dolabella, 10 A.D., with Nero’s aqueduct
Photograph: EAHN

Santa Maria in Domnica, interior with ninthcentury mosaics
Photograph: EAHN

The Navicella fountain in front of Santa Maria in Domnica
Photograph: EAHN

Santo Stefano Rotondo, interior, fifth century
Photograph: EAHN

Ettore Roesler Franz, view of Santo Stefano Rotondo with its mid fifteenth-century portico, watercolor, c. 1880.
Photograph: Wikimedia Commons

A Walk through Old Rome

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The Roman Forum, as David Watkin points out in his delightfully polemical book on the subject, is in some ways as much an artifact of the twentieth century as it is of Roman antiquity, the result of demolitions, excavations and restorations that transformed a once-thriving neighborhood into a modern archaeological park before the city knew what it had lost.* Yet we need not move very far away from the Forum to find traces of that same old Rome, where the ancient past still takes its own part in the day-to-day business of the living city—along with traces of everything that has happened in between the age of the Caesars and yesterday.

For many reasons, the Arch of Constantine is a good starting point; a walk from here to the church of St. John Lateran takes us down streets that have certainly been in use since ancient Roman times, and may go back as far as the sixth century B.C.E. The Arch itself marks one of the great transitions in Roman history, when the Empire turned from a plethora of cults to a nearly exclusive preoccupation with Christianity. Its present physical isolation is the result of two large-scale urban campaigns, one undertaken by Pope Sixtus V in the late 1580s and one by Benito Mussolini in the 1930s. Both men made massive efforts to streamline Rome’s labyrinthine streets for wheeled traffic; for Sixtus this meant accommodating the stylish new taste for horse-drawn carriages, whereas Mussolini’s tastes ran to automobiles and tanks. It is a permanent monument that marks a single, short-lived event: Constantine’s triumphal procession after he defeated his rival Maxentius in a battle along the banks of the river Tiber just north of Rome, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 311 A.D. The night before the clash, Constantine had a dream in which the Christian starburst symbol, the Chi-Rho, appeared to him, and a plaque at the top of his triumphal arch gives credit to the God of Abraham for his victory. Two years later, in 313, the Emperor would grant official tolerance to Christianity, an illegal religion up to then (Christians refused to worship the Emperor as a god, which amounted to treason). In addition, Constantine would endow two huge, splendid churches, St. Peter’s and St. John Lateran.

Architecture in the age of Constantine had reached a level of fantastic sophistication, thanks to the lightness and strength of Roman concrete, and the fact that it could be molded into any shape an architect desired. Domes soared to dizzying heights; walls seemed to melt away into windows; columns and statues were carved in colored stone imported from every corner of the Empire, with porphyry, the deep maroon granite from Egypt, reserved exclusively for the Imperial house. The Arch of Constantine still preserves its yellow columns and some of its porphyry cladding; the rest of the cladding was stolen long ago, perhaps to decorate the floors of medieval churches. Its design, aside from its striking color scheme, is carefully traditional, putting Constantine into the long line of Roman—and even Etruscan—generals who had driven their chariots along this same street for perhaps as long as nine hundred years: a large central opening with two minor openings on either side. The Arch is nothing more than a ceremonial gate, a permanent monument to a single procession—but it was nonetheless a procession that changed the history of Christianity.

A close look at the Arch will reveal that the sculpture of Constantine’s time was considerably less skillful than the architecture: in fact, the striking differences in style among its various panels reveal that much of the Arch has been permanently “borrowed” from other monuments. Constantine knew what he was doing; he took panels that had been carved for the two emperors who presided over the Empire at the moment of its greatest geographical expansion: Trajan and Hadrian. Popular, cultured, and honored as gods at their death, Trajan and Hadrian were also outstanding patrons of art and architecture—Hadrian even designed buildings himself, beautiful buildings like the Pantheon and his country villa outside the nearby spa of Tivoli. The sculpture that Constantine appropriated was some of the most sophisticated the Empire ever produced. His own sculptors could not equal that refinement, but they could and did assemble the pieces in an elegant design.

The first person to notice these discrepancies was the painter Raphael, who wrote about them in the early sixteenth century in a letter to Pope Leo X (written between 1516 and 1519): the architecture is well thought out, he said, but the sculptures are “clumsy, with no style whatsoever.”

The Arch is still surrounded by big basalt paving stones, the original Roman pavement of Constantine’s time, made from the same volcanic rock, from the same nearby quarries, as the smaller squared cobblestones on the surrounding streets—except for the road we shall soon be following, the Via di San Gregorio which leads from the Arch toward the Circus Maximus. For the Jubilee of 2000, this street was paved with cobblestones imported from China. The Chinese cobbles were cut short and blocky to save money, but they have turned out to represent a false economy. Roman cobblestones are long and cone-shaped, so that once set, they stay rooted in place, just like the human teeth they closely resemble. The short Chinese cobblestones have the shape, and the staying power, of human baby teeth, and the roadside is already littered with them, with no tooth fairy in sight.

Aside from its dental problems, the Via di San Gregorio looks much as Mussolini left it, with a Fascist-era fountain in yellow marble on the left and the imposing remains of the Palatine palace on the right. The red-brick arches of an aqueduct have been heavily restored in recent times to preserve them; some of the brickwork looks surprisingly new because it is new, but the aqueduct itself goes back to the time of Nero, who died in A.D. 68. A stone staircase rises up the hill behind the yellow marble fountain, designed in 1933 by Antonio Muñoz (1884-1960), an architect, sculptor, painter and restorer who served for many years as Superintendent of Antiquities for the City of Rome, and bears a great deal of responsibility for the way places like the Forum look today.

The fountain in Via di San Gregorio originally marked the entrance to a museum (now abandoned) celebrating the connection between Rome’s ancient heritage and the exploits of Mussolini. The fountain itself was vandalized after the Second World War, when angry Romans hacked away its Fascist symbols (the ancient fasces were bundles of rods bound together with an axe, symbolizing the authority of Roman consuls over the lives and limbs of Roman citizens; Mussolini appropriated them to symbolize his own authority). This is Mussolini’s entrance to the Caelian Hill, one of Rome’s traditional seven, a steep outcrop of volcanic stone whose outlines have been smoothed away and eroded in the past two thousand years. The promontory’s original name was apparently “Oak Hill,” Querquetal, but in the fifth century B.C.E. it was taken over by two Etruscan brothers, the warlords Aule and Caile Vipinas, or, as the Romans called them, Aulus and Caelius Vibenna, and renamed Caile’s Hill.

This northern slope is dominated by the façade of the church of Saint Gregory the Great and its three sixteenth-century oratories, but the street that leads uphill through narrow walls is a piece of Imperial Rome, with an Imperial Roman name, Clivus Scauri, “Scaurus’s Street.” The brick shop fronts on the left-hand side of the street, surmounted by a medieval church and a series of reinforcing arches (the tallest one is ancient), go back at least to the time of Trajan and Hadrian, and perhaps even to the time of Nero. These buildings are so sturdy and so well preserved that it has always been easier simply to use them than to tear them down. The church above them is dedicated to Saints John and Paul, two brothers (legend says that they were officers under Constantine) martyred in the year 362, during the reign of Julian the Apostate, the last Roman emperor to resist Christianity. The church itself was dedicated in 398, and built over the ancient Roman shop fronts and the houses behind them. Modern archaeological excavations (begun in 1887, now a well-kept museum) revealed a whole tiny neighborhood, with a communal well decorated with a large, voluptuous marine Venus—or perhaps the underworld goddess Proserpina—floating on her half-shell with a male companion as cupids fish from an elegant boat. One large frescoed room, remodeled in the third century, was used as a meeting place for Christians. Most of the figures on its walls and ceiling, the animals and lush garlands, cannot be securely identified either as Christian or classical; they were painted at the very moment when the Empire began to change its dominant religion. One person, however, is definitely Christian, a young man with his hands flung outward in the early church’s typical gesture of prayer. This house was eventually deeded to the Church by its owner, becoming one of the ancient properties known as tituli (“title deeds”). Santi Giovanni e Paolo is the one surviving Roman titulus where we can see a private Christian home transformed into a public building, although a similar story must have happened many times in the early history of the Church.

The church itself has undergone a long series of transformations since its construction at the end of the fourth century. The arcaded gallery that dominates its apse is a twelfth-century addition, as are the colonnaded portico in front, with its reused ancient columns of Egyptian granite, and the magnificent bell tower, decorated with colorful green and yellow ceramic plates. The interior of the church was entirely remodeled in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries; only its shape recalls its Early Christian origins. That shape was borrowed from ancient Roman law courts, or basilicas: a long box with a tall central space, two side aisles, and a recess, or tribunal, at one end. The Early Christians needed buildings that would hold a crowd, but they wanted to avoid any suggestion of ancient temples. The bell tower, annexed to the convent rather than the church, rests on an imposing ancient ruin: the remains of a temple to the Emperor Claudius, erected by his successor Nero. Huge blocks of travertine are carved to look as if they just came from the quarry. The temple stood in a dramatic position along the sheer edge of the Caelian Hill; beneath it, Nero installed a monumental fountain, whose brick core, long stripped of its marble facing, is still visible from the street. There is no doubt that this majestic monument inspired the eighteenth-century engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose famous Prisons evoke its huge rusticated arcades.

As we continue down the Clivus Scauri between narrow walls, we pass underneath the red brick structure of Nero’s aqueduct, which rests here on a still older travertine arch, erected in the year 10 by the Roman consuls Publius Cornelius Dolabella and Gaius Junius Silanus. There has been an arch here, however, since the time of the Etruscan warriors Aule and Caile Vipinas—for on this site the city’s most ancient fortification, the Servian Wall, had one of its gates, the Porta Querquetulana. A tiny church, San Tommaso in Formis, “Saint Thomas in the Aqueduct,” is tucked in among Nero’s brick arches, restored in the seventeenth century; it is home to a tiny convent of Trinitarian fathers and a neat little garden full of fat, contented cats.

Just up the hill from the Arch of Dolabella stands another Early Christian church, Santa Maria in Domnica; like Santi Giovanni e Paolo, it has preserved its original basilica shape through all its later remodelings. Pope Paschal I redid the mosaics in the ninth century (he also added mosaic apse decorations to the Early Christian churches of Santa Prassede and Santa Cecilia in Trastevere—all of them lively works in vibrant colors); Pope Leo X, with the architect and sculptor Andrea Sansovino, contributed the Renaissance portico and the coffered roof in 1518—the same Leo to whom Raphael addressed his observations about the Arch of Constantine. The little marble ship that stands in front of the basilica is ancient (possibly a votive gift to the Egyptian goddess Isis), and has been in this place at least since 1518, when Andrea Sansovino sculpted the base on which it stands. But the fountain and its pebble mosaic of fish were installed in the nineteenth century, as joyously colorful, if nowhere near as formal, as the mosaics inside the church. The assemblage is called the “Navicella,” the “little ship.”

Across the Via della Navicella, behind a garden wall, we can see the central tower of another Early Christian building, the church of Santo Stefano Rotondo (“Round Saint Stephen”), built in the fifth century as a series of three concentric rings of columns. The entrance portico, however, was installed circa 1453, perhaps by the great Tuscan architect Leon Battista Alberti. We see Alberti’s portico here in a nineteenth-century watercolor by Ettore Roesler Franz. The interior, newly restored, is a dazzling play of light and space, one more indication that Raphael was right to say that architecture still throve in the Early Christian period. The church became a house for Jesuit novices in the mid-sixteenth century. For this community, in the 1570s, the painters Pomarancio and Antonio Tempesta painted frescoes of gruesome martyrdom as a preparation for mission abroad, and many Jesuits would indeed meet violent deaths in the Americas, Asia and—not least—Europe. Santo Stefano Rotondo now houses a community of nuns whose lives are devoted to a more placid way of life, and the gardens around the church, insulated from Rome’s maddening traffic, still seem to belong, like so many of the buildings in this area, to an older, less hectic era. This region of Rome retains its antique flavor because it never recovered entirely from the terrible street fighting that pitted Pope Gregory VII and his Norman allies against Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV in 1084; it was not built up again until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and even now it is an oasis in the middle of a chaotic modern city.

Ingrid D. Rowland
School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame
Rome

*David Watkin, The Roman Forum, Wonders of the World (London: Profile Books, 2009).