The mention of looted columns reminded me of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Its famous double tiered arcades were purely pragmatic height creating compromise as a result of the local Roman and Visigothic columns not being tall enough for the large interior space.
At least, that was the case when the mosque was built in the 8th century. When the mosque was expanded [0] on several occasions over the next few centuries they made sure to commission new copies of the columns. Why? So they could build double arcades just like Abd al-Rahman I. A pragmatic solution copied not out of pragmatism, but in order to claim legitimacy through aesthetic continuation (much like every neoclassical building ever).
[0] Friday mosques traditionally have to have enough capacity to contain the entire Muslim population for the Friday prayer, so as the city grows so must the mosque.
> When archaeologists opened up the under layer, they found a Madonna, probably 8th century, which then decayed before their eyes (horror!) due to exposure to the air.
There is a scene of this in Frederico Fellinni’s Roma if anyone has patience for a 2 hour long comedic dramatic film in which the main character of the film is Rome itself
I met Ignazio Marino once, liked him a lot, and been following his short stint as mayor of Rome.
Unfortunately for him, the back-then Prime Minister, Renzi, decided to drop support for him, pushed by many interest groups (some say even the roman mafia), angry at Marino for wanting to disrupt old balances of power.
I had a chance to speak to Marino when he came to give a talk about bioethics at my PhD institution. He was a very smart man - but he made several mistakes.
For example - he made up a ridiculous story about being invited by the pope to attend a march in Philadelphia, which quickly got exposed as a lie. He was also completely unable to handle the local Roman political players / senior civil servants (who, granted, are hideously corrupt and have been running things for their own self dealings with left governments, center governments, far right governments, and 5 star governments (whatever they are)).
> Unfortunately for him, the back-then Prime Minister, Renzi, decided to drop support for him
I think this narrative has spread too much and has become one of those lies that repeated indefinitely become truths.
Marino had a problem: he wasn't a long time memmber of PD (Democratic Party) of Rome, they had another candidate but Marino beat him at the primaries and became mayor of Rome.
So they started the war against him.
Renzi simply acknowledged that the roman PD was a nest of vipers and put a commissar (Orfini) to handle the transition.
But it wasn't Renzi that created Mafia capitale where members of PD were involved with bipartisan criminals of Rome (like Tassoni in Ostia that was in bed with the gipsy-mob family Spada)
I'm also talking about corruption, years after it's clear that Renzi was right when che tried to reset the roman PD, his fault was not being able to actually clean the house
Also, Marino wasn't loved by romans because he had radicals ideas about modernizing the city and romans are generally resistant to changes and also because he made some bad communication mistake.
I'm telling this as a roman who campaigned for Marino, voted for him and was happy having him as mayor.
I don't think that my statement about Renzi is in conflict with your explanation. I summarized it as "drop support for him", and avoided a longer explanation.
I am roughly in agreement with your longer explanation. And, by the way: thanks for your work with his campaign; I wish he stayed and enacted these reforms.
I live in Rome, so I can give a bit of feedback on it.
The road has been turned to pedestrian-only since August 2013 by the mayor Marino. It has been like that ever since. There is currently no plan for deconstruction, and the future of the road is still up to debate. I think it makes for a very nice walk in the heart of Rome, with plenty of space for tourists to wonder around without being cramped.
Interesting read. The Basilica of San Clemente, which the author spends some time describing, was the basis for the fictional "Basilica di San Tommaso" in Ngaio Marsh's 1970 novel "When in Rome" -- a nice read for those who enjoy the murder mystery genre, history and archaeology.
> Via dei Fori Imperiali, a grand boulevard running along the Forum and around the Capitoline, which Mussolini built so he could have processions, and to declare to the world how sure he was that no one would care about the Roman relics he was paving over
My guide in Rome, historian and avid city explorer, told me, that Mussolini wanted to extend might and glory of Ancient Rome into XX century, not to made it obsolete and forgotten. One of the purposes of Via dei Fori Imperiali was for him to have a view of Colosseum from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, where he used to deliver his speeches.
The piecemeal church is fascinating. To me it suggests that people should be less concerned with rebuilding Notre Dame exactly as it was; every layer is a piece of history, and one day (one hopes) our period will be considered history as well.
Not entirely related, the Formula E is racing today in the streets of Rome, in the area near Piazza Marconi. Very visually appealing street circuit for the race.
the place were the race is taking place is called EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma Universal Rome Exposition in English), the neighborhood that was built for the universal exposition of 1942 that never happened due to World war 2.
It took me the description of the mithraeum, well into the article, to remember that I've visited this church, some 25 years ago. It's wild how these teenage memories are coming back :).
Very interesting article otherwise, I've always been fascinated by the entanglement of history we see in these old cities of Europe and Middle East.
Great piece! I love how the author structures the post, taking us into the structure and all of it's subsequent layers down on through historical time.
I rolled my eyes at Freud's mention, in the eyes of such immense ancient culture, here we are still talking about a second rate scientist who falsified evidence and set psychology back 50 years.
Psychology has set itself back 50 years. After disavowing all of Freud's ideas, psychology has spent decades constructing a piecemeal web of unreproducible experiments only to conclude on a lot of ideas that Freud had already developed: that the mind is driven by unconscious processes, that trauma has a enduring impact on these processes that lead to pathologies, etc... Today a lot of neuroscientists are picking up where Freud left off: Solms, Friston, Carhart-Harris, ...
Research in this area was initiated in some ways by an extensive paper by nobel laureate neuroscientist Eric Kandel outlining the ways in which many of Freud's ideas could be reaserched from a modern neuroscientific perspective. In this paper
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/ajp.156.4....
Kandel asserts that psychoanalysis today still offers the most intellectually satisfying model of the mind and builds on this contention to suggest the various frontiers upon which it can be investigated with neuroscientific tools.
I think Freud has gained a tremendously distorted image among a public that eschews actually reading his ideas directly, instead accepting out of hand a strewn-together strawman erected from third hand accounts of them. I would suggest at least reading Freud's 1915 essay "the Unconscious".
Thank you for this. Freud has a bad reputation among people who know nothing, but he was flawed genius who gave us the basis for what we do know about the mind. He’s only remembered for the goofy parts because the rest is just “how things obviously work”—-obvious, of course, only after his work.
Yes, there's probably a major element of that giving me this impression. However, we have a lot of surviving Roman structures compared to Celtic or Germanic structures, for example.
3D reconstructions of ancient Rome show a city that relies heavily on stone, concrete and marble in its construction:
Sidewalks in Rome are worst I've ever seen. Even in Russia, where roads "quality" is a joke for locals, sidewalks are more usable. In Rome, sidewalk might disappear suddenly and you are on the road with the baby carriage and cars around you.
It's far from the only city with bad sidewalks. It more than made it up for me that just like in most other cities, manhole covers and the like carry the insignia of the local communal administration. Here: S.P.Q.R. - suddenly branding efforts of Apple, Nike, the Coca Cola Company and so on seemed almost amateurish.
S.P.Q.R. is one of the oldest current brands, comes from the Roman Empire. Translates from latin to "The Senate and the people of Rome" I worked there for a year in 1974. Italians visiting from other parts of Italy claimed it stood for "Sono Porci Questi Romani". I love that city, need to find time to go back.
The Italian translation of the Asterix comics makes the Gauls spell it as "Sono Pazzi Questi Romani", these Romans are crazy. Asterix became popular at about the time you were working in Rome. I guess that this translation is the most popular one nowadays. Of course we know it's Senatus Popolusque Romanorum.
Roman here, living in the area near Colosseum: the road still exists but has been pedonalized by Marino and it made the archeological park completely different.
Now people can safely walk around, the only allowed vehicles are public buses and archeological excavation have become a prominent activity in the area.
it's still messy because the new subway tunnels are taking a lot longer to be built than planned (that's quite normal in Rome unfortunately) but it's many times better than it was before when the main users where cars and traffic jams.
our guide told us there used to be traffic jams in ancient Rome as well - when we were standing at the traffic light waiting to cross the road. so humbling to feel a thousand year back someone might be standing at the exact place waiting to cross the road and get into the Colosseum for the games ...
At least, that was the case when the mosque was built in the 8th century. When the mosque was expanded [0] on several occasions over the next few centuries they made sure to commission new copies of the columns. Why? So they could build double arcades just like Abd al-Rahman I. A pragmatic solution copied not out of pragmatism, but in order to claim legitimacy through aesthetic continuation (much like every neoclassical building ever).
[0] Friday mosques traditionally have to have enough capacity to contain the entire Muslim population for the Friday prayer, so as the city grows so must the mosque.