In Rome, there are many second-tier antique monuments, sometimes no less interesting - just more modest ones that did not appear on the first pages of tourist booklets. They have a big advantage: most of them are not museumified (that is, they are available at any time of the day or night for free), and there are usually no tourist crowds around.
If you search the Internet for the word "Rome", the largest percentage of photos will be of the Colosseum (Trevi Fountain and St. Peter's Basilica are competing for second place). The obligatory program of acquaintance with the ancient civilization in the Eternal City is known to everyone, and it can even tire a little by the end of the third day: Forum, Colosseum, Palatine, Capitoline Museums, Vatican Museums, Theater of Marcellus, Altar of Peace, Pantheon … But in Rome there are many ancient monuments " second row”, sometimes no less interesting - just more modest, not included in the first pages of travel booklets. They have a big advantage: most of them are not museumified (that is, they are available at any time of the day or night for free), and there are usually no tourist crowds around. I will try to introduce you to some of them.
Tomb of the baker Evrysak
In the 19th century, Pope Gregory XVI decided to free the arch of the gates on the Porta Maggiore square (once the channels of several Roman aqueducts passed along these arches) from medieval layers. Under one of the dismantled towers, a large monument was discovered, which had hardly been seen before. Its concrete core is lined with typical Roman stone - travertine, and on each of the surviving sides the inscription is clearly read: EST HOC MONIMENTUM MARCEI VERGILEI EURYSACIS PISTORIS REDEMPTORIS APPARET.
Near the tomb, they found a relief depicting a man and a woman, an urn for ashes in the form of a bread basket (death can also be used for advertising purposes) and a plate with another inscription: “Atistia was my spouse and a beautiful woman, her remains are from her body, those are in this breadbox. " The relief and the inscription have survived in the Capitoline Museums, and the "bread box", unfortunately, has disappeared.
The baker's Greek name "Euryssac" almost certainly indicates his simple origin - he was a freedman, a former slave or the son of slaves. Because of this, art historians often looked down on the tomb of Eurystacus, seeing in it evidence of bad common taste, a rejection of traditional Roman values - moderation and accuracy; it was compared to the tomb that Petronia invents for herself in the "Satyricon" by the vulgar nouveau riche Trimalchion. But you can look at the tomb of Evrysak with a more sympathetic look. To see it as evidence of the social mobility characteristic of Rome. Hear the story of the life and death of a person who, at the end of the republican era, achieved wealth, social recognition, honor by his own labor and his own hands. Who was selflessly proud of his craft.
Promotional video:
The reliefs surrounding the upper part of the tomb depict different stages of bread preparation: workers carry grain, pour it into large quantities, weigh it, and transfer it to wholesale buyers; the grain is ground (the driving force of the mill is rather gloomy donkeys), sifted; finally, the dough is stirred (again with the help of draft force), rolled out, baked in the oven. Even the monument itself is built in such a way as to remind of the bakery craft: the vertical pipes in the lower tier may represent towers for storing grain, and the horizontal holes, which have not yet been explained satisfactorily, may represent dough mixers, or, according to one radical hypothesis, even be real dough mixers built into the tomb.
Temple of "Minerva the Healer"
A traveler arriving in Rome by train finds himself in the area of cheap hotels, Chinese souvenir shops and Middle Eastern eateries. Behind this unsightly façade, it's hard to see antiquity. But she is nearby, and there is a lot of her - you just need to look more closely. For example, if you walk southeast along the uncomfortable street of Giovanni Giolitti (which you can get off directly from Termini station), after about a kilometer you will find yourself near a large building made of concrete, faced with brick. The atmosphere around is not at all a museum; a casual passer-by would not guess that the building is 1700 years old. But if you wish, you can find a particle of Roman charm in this abandonment.
The building has long been considered a decorative nymphaean fountain, but it is more likely that it was a lavish dining pavilion with fountains and pools. Its decagonal hall was covered with a dome with light lobes filling the space between brick stiffeners. The dome of Minerva, one of the few that has survived from ancient times, has been the subject of admiration and careful study. It can be seen in one of Piranesi's prints. Unfortunately, it suddenly collapsed in 1828. The architecture of the pavilion was so unusual that several decades after its erection, several wedge-shaped buttresses, a semicircular niche and a portico were added to it. And in such a more traditional form, gradually crumbling and overgrowing with a discreet urban landscape, the building has survived to this day.
Marble leg
From Piazza della Minerva, next to the Pantheon (don't miss the funny elephant sculpted according to Bernini's sketches - it has irregular hind legs, with hocks like a horse), departs one of those Roman streets, whose name sounds like a poem - Via del Pie di Marmo, which means Marble Foot Street. If you walk along it to the east, towards Corso, then at the corner of the third street on the right, (Via San Stefano del Cacco), you will indeed find a lone marble foot. Judging by the type of sandal, this is a man's foot. Perhaps it belonged to the spouse of the Egyptian goddess Isis Serapis and appeared in Rome at a time when, after the conquest of Egypt, the cult of the local gods gained popularity in the capital.
Nymph of Alexander Sever
On the square named after King Victor Emmanuel II, there is a rather monumental ancient Roman monument, which tourists rarely reach. This is the so-called nymph of Alexander Sever. Nymphaeus is a large decorative fountain, which differs from the usual one by its greater "naturalness" or simply enormous size. Many nymphs served as drainage centers, from where water from aqueducts flowed to different quarters of the city.
This nymph bears the name of Emperor Alexander Sever (III century AD) rather conditionally, according to the dating of building materials, although experts believe that it was built earlier, under the Flavias, and then only renovated. In its original form, it looked like a three-span triumphal arch, only the place of the spans was occupied by huge niches. In the central one, apparently, there was a statue of Jupiter or the goddess Victoria. And what was on the sides is known for sure: there were reliefs depicting military armor.
For some reason, these so-called "trophies" in medieval times began to be associated with the victory of the commander Maria over the Germanic tribes of Cimbri and Teutons at the end of the 2nd century BC, and the nymph itself began to be called the Temple of Mary or "Trophy of Mary (which was once it was a fountain, no one remembered for a long time). In 1590, Pope Sixtus V moved the reliefs to the top of the stairs leading to the Capitol Hill. There they stand to this day.
Arch of Aqua Virgo aqueduct
Most of the Champs de Mars fountains are connected to an aqueduct called the Aqua Virgo. It is one of the few aqueducts in Rome that operated throughout the Middle Ages. By the Renaissance, his pressure turned into a thin trickle, but when Pope Nicholas V decided to resume the work of the aqueduct in the 15th century, he was able to do it without much effort. The aqueduct was built by the closest associate of the Emperor Augustus, Marcus Agrippa, around 19 BC. BC to provide water for a complex of new baths near the Pantheon.
According to legend, the source of water to his soldiers was suggested by a young girl, after whom the water supply was named (virgo in Latin "maiden"). With a total length of 20 kilometers, the difference in level between the starting and ending points was only four meters - a testament to the incredible accuracy and skill of Roman engineers (the Roman aqueduct acted due to gravity - the water simply had to flow downhill along the entire length of the aqueduct, no matter how small) … A significant part of the aqueduct ran underground. One of its supporting arches can be seen - well below current ground level - behind bars in the courtyard of number 14 Via del Nazareno. The arch is made of travertine in a deliberately rough manner typical of the times of Emperor Claudius.
The power of Aqua Virgo is clearly visible in the stormy waters of the most famous Roman fountain - the Trevi Fountain. On the right side of its facade there is a relief depicting the soldiers of Agrippa and the girl who pointed the source to them.
Claudian table on the expansion of pomery
On the Champ de Mars, where there have been significantly fewer rebuildings and reconstructions over the past two or three centuries than in other areas of Rome, you can sometimes, if you're lucky, see an image of the old city, as if captured in neorealist footage. Moreover, tourists rarely come to the most remote corners of this quarter, and this is the very center of the city, and the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon are within easy reach.
In one of these remote corners, in the northwestern corner of Via del Pellegrino (numbers 145-147, where the street merges at an obtuse angle with Via dei Banca Vecca), on an unremarkable house hangs a very remarkable table from the time of the Emperor Claudius, which ends with the words finibus pomerium ampliavit terminavitque - "he pushed the boundaries of the pomeria and marked" Pomeria is the sacred border of the city; according to legend, the first pomery was carried out under Romulus, plowing the land around the fortress on bulls and raising the plow in those places where the gate should have been built.
It is especially interesting that instead of the letter v, the words ampliavit and terminavit use a special letter, introduced into circulation by Claudius himself, like several other letters. This spelling reform of the scholarly emperor did not last long. Immediately after his death, and he was poisoned by eating mushrooms carefully offered to him by his own wife Messalina, these innovations fell out of use, and until the consistent differentiation of the letters U and V, as Claudius proposed, mankind again matured only by the 17th century.
Arch changed
In the wall of my favorite Roman church, San Giorgio in Velabro, is a Roman structure commonly called the Arcus Argentariorum. Perhaps it served as a portal for the ceremonial entrance to the Bull Forum, located nearby, where they traded in cattle. It is written on the building that it was dedicated to the Emperor Septimius Severus and his household “the moneychangers and cattle traders of this place” (argentari et negotiantes boari huius loci).
The inscription and reliefs on the arch were repeatedly edited, because during the reign of the Severian dynasty, one or the other of the clan members were subjected to a procedure known as damnatio memoriae ("curse of memory").
This practice, known from the days of Ancient Egypt to the era of Stalin's "disappearing commissars", involved deleting an unwanted name from all official dedicatory inscriptions and, if possible, destroying any visual information about this person. Several members of the imperial family were killed and banned from mentioning - and in this regard, their names and figures disappeared from the arch.
The most interesting reliefs are located on the inner side of the arch: on the left, the emperor Caracalla is making libations on a mobile portable altar, and next to it is an empty place smoothed with a chisel, where once there were figures of the disgraced courtier; on the other hand, the sacrifice is made by the emperor Septimius Sever and his wife Julia Domna, and also someone's figure is retouched, and the priest's rod appears as if out of thin air.
Medieval legend claimed that the money changers hid their treasures inside the arch. They even wrote a poem about this: Tra la vacca e il toro, troverai un gran tesoro - "Row gold with a sack between a cow and a bull." The sacrificial bull is depicted on the left on the outside of the arch, and the cow, flirtatiously raising its tail, on the right, on the inside. That is why there are so many holes on the arch. The treasure was not found.
Victor Sonkin