Ancient Rome

Federico Fellini once had a dream in which he was imprisoned deep under Rome. He heard unearthly voices through the walls that said “We are the ancient Romans. We are still here.” This eventually led to the creation of Roma, his 1972 homage to the city. There is a scene in the movie where engineers are drilling underground for a subway and accidentally break into a 2,000 year old Roman house with their drill. This is an amazing thing to think about: that at any point while you are in Rome, some ancient building could be beneath your feet, lost to the world.

Before the Tiber was walled up and tamed, it used to flood Rome annually. These floods moved the earth from its banks into ancient homes, temples, theaters, etc, and brought a lot of them down. Instead of clearing everything out and fixing the mess however, the ancient Romans did what anyone today would find inconceivable: they built over it. This practice went on for years and explains why so many things are found below the city whenever anyone wants to build anything these days, an annoyance for modern Romans, but a delight to the rest of the world. For example, Pompey’s Theater (the first public theater in Rome) and three temples were discovered under Largo Argentina when construction workers began building a new hotel while Mussolini was in power. Locals were well aware of the theater’s existence, nearby apartments in Campo di Fiori were built on a semicircle, following the theater’s foundations, though the three temples came as a surprise.

As I sit in my annoyingly modern apartment I wonder what could be beneath all these floors. A forgotten villa? An ancient marketplace? A marble statue of Mercury? I’d be amazed even if was only a single sandal, preserved deep below the concrete for thousands of years.