When is a City a Museum and when is it not.

Tags

Archeology, artists, construction, Greece, Italy, metropolitana, Roman Forum, Rome, Vatican

For those of you who read this blog, you will have noticed that I write a lot about the City of Rome. It is the City that was for 1000 years the Capital of the known world. Much more so than Athens which was a City-State but never became the centre of a vast Empire, despite the many gifts Athens gave the world, Democracy, Theatre, Rhetoric, Philosophy, etc… which shaped the development of the Western World.

Rome like Sleeping Beauty falls into a 900 year sleep when Emperor Constantine for political and administrative reasons decided to move the Capital to Ravenna and then create a new Capital Constantinople (Istanbul) in 330 AD. Ushering the Middle-Age, a period of illiteracy and superstition, knowledge left the world only to be reborn in 1300 with the Italian Renaissance which brought back Humanist values and a re-birth of the old ideas of Greece and Rome.

Equestrian statue of Emperor Constantine (272 AD to 337 AD), in the entrance portico of the Cathedral of San John Lateran in Rome. 

This brings us to Rome today, with all its infrastructure problems and the building of Line C of the Metropolitana, the subway system, 7 years late and 3 billion Euros over budget. Rome is a city of 3 million people in a small dense area, crammed with cultural and artistic treasures everywhere you look. Rome today was re-built largely at the time of the late Renaissance (1490-1560) and the age of the Baroque (1600-1720) re-modelling buildings of antiquity and late Middle-Age. The next big construction spurt came between 1860 and 1938. Rome being what it is suffers from procrastination, City Officials, the political class, Academics, Archeologists, Historians and everyone in between has an opinion as to what to do in terms of development but decisions are slow to come and never quite final. So since 1960 it has been far easier to develop the outlying areas some 20 Km from the centre than the centre itself. The only man who dared demolish on a grand scale the centre of the City to open it up to new development was Benito Mussolini who has dictator in 20 years in power did develop the infrastructure of the City without taking into account what others had to say. Everyone including the tourists benefitted from these great civic works. What you see today in the Forum area is his doing, around the Vatican, and the new neighbourhoods outside the Aurelian Walls and EUR including the metro system all his doing. But this was achieved only through the demolition of entire neighbourhoods and created employment for thousands of men at the time of the great depression.

Demolition of neighbourhoods to create Via dell’Impero known today as Via dei Fori Imperiali.

Today things are different, I subscribe to a blog Rome – The Imperial Fora: Archaeological News and Related Studies 2010-2015 which devotes all its entries to Rome and what is happening in the City, four to five times a day I will get long blog entries in Italian, sometimes in English written by people who are researchers, archeologists and historians, the host is Martin G. Conde, (I do not read it all it’s often too laboured) on a project delay or a scandal involving a construction site. https://rometheimperialfora19952010.wordpress.com

Presently Line C of the Metro is crawling towards its connection with San Giovanni Laterano on Line A. Last year 12 stations opened all at once from Pantano to Parco di Centocelle, this year the line is extended from Mirti to Lodi. The Station at Lodi is 1 Km from San Giovanni. Next year it will finally be connected to Line A of the Metro system. This new line has been in construction for 15 years. Now for the difficult part and the fight with historians, archeologists, tree lovers and Romans who have an opinion on the matter, well they all do.

The next phase will see Line C go towards the historical section of the Roman Forum and Piazza Venezia and then down Corso Vittorio Emanuelle towards the river Tiber and the Vatican on the other side. You could walk the distance in about 40 minutes. The metro tunnels are some 60 meters underground, one would think it’s deep enough to avoid any artifacts from Antiquity. Not so.  In 2008, 2009 at Piazza Venezia which is the centre of Rome, archeologists preparing the ground for the arrival of the metro tunnel discovered the long forgotten or lost Academy of Emperor Hadrian and another building connected to the Forum of Emperor Trajan next to it. Both buildings where just a few meters below the street surface and all that is left are brick walls and the inlaid coloured marble floors. Well this discovery stopped all work on the metro line for 4 years. Then discussion papers were presented and long meetings and conferences held with a host of archeologists, historians and all kinds of experts on antiquity, what to do, some proposed to cancel the metro stop all together at Piazza Venezia. Others pointed out that Mussolini had a Metro station built at the Colosseum, yes but he was a dictator. Others also pointed out that the tunnels are so deep they cannot come in contact with the two buildings at Piazza Venezia. Yes but those buildings are important witness of the past and should not be disturbed though they are now reburied under the street. Does this make any sense? Is it practical to think thus? Cost overruns and delays should trump such concerns given that all the necessary research work has been done.

So here you have it the eternal question for the Eternal City, Is Rome a city for the living or is Rome a vast Museum to the glory of the Imperial past.  

If you are wondering the tunnel work has resume on the section between San Giovanni and Colosseo and Piazza Venezia. Each day the blog publishes photos of the progress of the work along Via Fori Imperiali and along the ruins of the Temple of Venus and Rome to the great disapproval of the experts. But the discussions and gnashing of teeth goes on and on and on. In the end I predict that the metro line will be opened and work completed despite it all. Italians are very attached to the past but in the end things do get done.

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Something different if you are into Academic discourse

Tags

Augustus, Roman Forum, Rome, Titus, Trajan, Vespasian, Via Alessandrina

I am itching to write something about the idiotic discourse in Canada at the moment based largely on ignorance on Niqab, Hijab and what else or on the Federal Election Campaign with the depressing campaign theme of Fear, Vengeance, War and Xenophobia but I won’t, I remember the words of my late mother who use to say to us children that in life when confronted with this sort of unpleasant dish it was better to take the high road. Though I would like to know when did ignorance become a virtue?

So let me talk instead of a very interesting discussion going on right now in Rome about a short bit of roadway called Via Alessandrina. The blog Roma Archeologia which reproduces articles in Italian and sometimes in English, explains the debate amongst archeologists and academics who study Roman ruins and the area of the Roman Forum, the old original centre of the Eternal City. The Roman Forum we see today with all the ruins of the ancient city is due to the political program of Il Duce Benito Mussolini who wanted to resurrect the glory of Imperial Rome in modern times. So dig and dig it up and that is what he decreed. This old centre had been buried for centuries and new neighbourhood had grown above it at the end of the Middle ages around 1400. So the old ruins took on an added importance as symbol of the greatness of Rome and Western civilization. Via Alessandrina was a street in a neighbourhood built around 1500 which also marks the renaissance of the City and the re-building of many churches in a Renaissance or Baroque style and of the Basilica of St-Peter, the original one was simply demolished.

In 1930 Mussolini wanting to re-model the centre of Rome and celebrate the Roman Emperors had the whole neighbourhood around the Via demolished only Via Alessandrina, the street, remains, but the demolition uncovered the Forum of Julius Cesar, Forum of Trajan and the Forum of Augustus and Nerva, Archeologists knew it was all there but had no means to get to it. This was very significant politically for Mussolini and in 1934 he organized huge celebration to mark the 2000 year of the birth of Emperor Augustus by having his giant Mausoleum renovated and the museum of the Ara Pacis built.

The round structure in the picture is the ancient mausoleum in the old Fields of Mars in Rome.

So we come to today and our modern preoccupations with history and what to do with the legacy of Mussolini. For the last 30 years there has been talk about closing the  street Via Alessandrina and removing it all together so that the different Fori could be explored fully and freed from this obstacle restoring them to their original land size. Every year more and more artefacts are unearth and  this has excited many archeologists to the potential of the area. The main road which was built by Mussolini for his military parades the Via dei Fori Imperiali is also another sizeable problem open to discussion it runs parallel to Via Alessandrina and it much wider, longer and bigger. It runs from Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum and at the moment the Mayor of Rome Ignazio Marino will have it closed to car traffic several weeks of the year and every Sunday. There has been an enormous amount of excavations going on in and around the Roman Forum in the last 15 years and our understanding of this area has much improved.

Via Alessandria and the partly demolished neighbourhood in 1932. Via dei Fori Imperiali is on the bottom left under construction.

What it looks like today as it cuts in two the Forum of Trajan

What you see now, the ground level corresponds to the late second century AD, meaning that if you are looking for ruins from the time of Julius Cesar 44 BC they are about 4 meters below ground level. It is difficult for a visitor to Rome who may not know much about the ancient structures what they are looking at or what it all means. But with the announced plans to raise the 7 pink granite columns of the Temple of Peace built by Vespasian to celebrate the victory of his son Titus over the Jews and the final destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, you can see continuous changes in the Forum.    https://www.flickr.com/photos/imperial_fora_of_rome/sets/72157600215755762

Despite opening up more and more space to walk around in the Forum, you are still restricted to a path mostly the Via Sacra which is the old parade route through the Forum and side streets connecting the various antique temples and buildings. It is all fragile and too often mass tourist movements are simply not sensitive enough to what they are looking at. However if you steal an artefact or deface a monument the fine is $28,000 dollars and one month in jail, yes it is enforced.