Finding The Eternal In The Eternal City

Since Rome has been around for two and a half thousand years (!), Mr. C & I decided we could devote a few more days to exploring its ancient history.

Everyone’s familiar with the Colosseo, the stadium that was the precursor of most others (at least in terms of design), but adjacent to it there’s a lesser known area--The Roman Forum.  More than a thousand years of history have been unearthed here. Surprisingly, we can thank Benito Mussolini for uncovering it. Apparently in his zeal to create a big boulevard, Il Duce’s construction guys found centuries worth of forums, rostra, meeting sites, arches, columns, etc. Focus shifted from building a fancy new street to restoring artifacts as a way to inspire civic pride. Nationalism was the name of the game for Benito.

Walking through the Colosseo, what’s still standing of the Roman Forum, and other sites in the area you begin to understand why Rome is rightfully called “the eternal city.” Many of the buildings that are standing are the third, fourth, or fifth iteration on the sites. For instance, The Curia is a building on a site where Romans had been meeting for centuries before a building was even erected—centuries before Christ was born. The building that’s left standing is the fifth one built on the site.

In another area of the Roman Forum, a series of steps lead up to a surface area where civil court cases were heard from 40-something B.C. to about 410 A.D. It’s called the Basilica Julia (after Julius Caesar).  There are permanent grooves in the marble steps where kids played games like marbles, and a sort of tic-tac-toe. 

Other highlights for me on this walking tour  were Trajan’s Market, the Circus Maximus, and the Vittorio Emanuelle monument.

 Trajan’s Market once housed hundreds of shops and arcades on multiple levels where goods sourced from throughout all of the Roman empire could be purchased. You can still see portions of the original marble floors.

Multi-level, multi-cultural
market

Circus Maximus

The Circus Maximus is an area made famous by Charlton Heston in the movie Ben Hur. More than 200,000 sports fans could watch chariot races here--and they had them all the time. The Caesars had palaces at the top of nearby Palatine Hill, giving them a prime perch to see the races. No reason to get too jealous of the Caesars and their luxury boxes...most of these guys and their families died violent deaths at early ages. Power had its price in the Roman empire.

Keep walking east from the Circus Maximus and fast-forward to the late 1800s. That’s where you’ll find the Vittorio Emanuele Monument. It’s completely constructed of a white marble quarried in the Italian city of Brescia. Brescia is north of Rome, at the foot of the Alps. Imagine carting tons and tons of marble 350 miles. I never did find out how they did it.

Regardless, this building will take your breath away from all angles. And, when you’re traveling in Rome, you’ll see it from all angles since it seems like wherever you're going--the Vittorio Emanuele is right there with you. It was originally built to honor Italy’s first president, thus it's name, and in 1921 the Italian’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and eternal flame were added.

There’s a massive sculpture of Emanuel riding a horse in the center of the monument.  Really massive—440 feet wide x nearly 250 feet high. Apparently when it was finally finished, a bunch of people celebrated with a fancy sit-down dinner inside the horse’s rear.  

American soldiers stationed here in WWII nicknamed the monument “the wedding cake.” Locals are more likely to call it “the typewriter” because that's what they think it looks like. People who know a lot about architecture say the Vittorio Emanuele is too big and gaudy, it's overdone and as a modern structure in the middle of ruins it's out of place.

Maybe I just like big and gaudy, but I say it’s awesome (in a giant wedding cake sort of way).



It’s certainly easy to feel insignificant when you immerse yourself in thousands of years of history. You get swept up thinking about leaders with names like Augustus and Septimus and Titus and, yes, Julius Caesar, Marc Antony and Cleopatra. But then you walk the streets, see the steps kids played on, look into the interior of what was a woman's home, and you can’t help but think about the generations of folks who lived here and led lives filled with dreams and hopes, family ups and downs, challenges, losses, and triumphs—just like our own.

Katerina