Rome is full of ruins of the ancient buildings of the city of the Caesars. Time has wreaked havoc and of the greatest city of antiquity, in general, only that remains, ruins. If one visits the Museo della Civiltà Romana and see the incredible model of the imperial city in the time of Constantine created by order of Mussolini for an exhibition on Augustus in 1937, you will realize the incredible amount of stone that the city accumulated in its buildings and monuments that, according to scholars, exceeded one million inhabitants. A discreet figure today for a capital, but back then it was a real outrage.
After observing the model, we will leave the museum sad and melancholic before the harsh reality:much more has been destroyed than what is left standing. Which leads us to ask, why were so many buildings destroyed? and what happened to all that stone? We will try in this article to briefly answer these questions.
The Edict of Thessalonica from 380 AD of the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the only official religion of the Roman Empire. This fact was essential for the temples dedicated to the Roman gods, now called pagan, to lose their primary value and their usefulness for the society of the time and the future. The dominant religion since then, Christianity, never liked this type of temple, but instead opted for the Roman basilica, more in keeping with its rituals. And the same can be said about the statues of gods and characters from ancient Rome that dotted the city, they were no longer worth anything and were also pagan. The case of the equestrian statue of Marco Aurelio is curious in the Campidoglio square; It is said that it was not destroyed because it was thought to represent Constantine, the first Christian emperor.
Most of the aqueducts stopped bringing the valuable water to the city from the Tiber. Some were destroyed on purpose by groups of barbarians who went to post-imperial Rome in search of riches and to force the population to surrender. Those that remained standing also stopped transporting water because an aqueduct needs constant cleaning and adaptation measures, a level of organization and money to invest that had already disappeared –more stone available -. Due to this new water deficit in early medieval Rome, one of the most famous architectural typologies of ancient Rome also lost its use. I mean the hot springs. Gigantic brick or cement structures that were now useless, but were covered with highly prized materials. The Cloaca Maxima It suffered the same abandonment, the entire valley of the Roman Forum was blinded and flooded, leaving all the monuments under a large layer of mud, which undoubtedly helped its conservation. In a few centuries, the area went from being the governing center of the great Roman Empire to becoming a grazing place for cattle, the “Campo Vaccino ”. In addition, we have to add the earthquakes that brought down other buildings, such as a part of the Colosseum.
Where do I want to go? If so many buildings were destroyed or ceased to serve, and no new functions were provided, they will eventually disappear in one form or another. These constructions were used as quarries for future buildings . They were expensive and difficult materials to extract, work and transport; but that work, the most expensive and complicated, had already been done, it had been done by the ancient Romans. Now those statues and various constructions would be dismantled along with all the elements that made it up (stones, wood, metal nails...) and would be reused for new purposes. The ashlars would go directly to ovens where they were melted to create quicklime, which in turn would be used to create mortar for new constructions. This form of destruction of the ancient heritage is undoubtedly the most tragic, since it made the material physically disappear, often with epigraphy, reliefs... At least, the ashlars or columns reused directly in palaces, churches or even houses, are still in sight .
The colored marble columns, coming from all over the empire, placed for example in the portico of an old temple, would serve perfectly to separate the naves of the new Christian churches with a basilica plan. In other words, they were reused or transported, to use the precise term, without losing their column function. The great multitude of medieval churches in Rome, (those with brick towers divided into floors with windows in each), are a sight. We can find in the same colonnade, one with a smooth shaft, another ribbed, another with a Corinthian capital, another without a capital, another with an Ionic capital, one shorter than the others for which they had to fit it, another with a base... and even columns of various materials, colors and thicknesses. These are the churches in which the Cosmas they decorated the floors with “Cosmatesque style mosaics ”. For the realization of these mosaics, old materials were also carried, in this case being treated in a very ingenious and innovative way of reuse.
This destructive work would last, with intervals of greater or lesser intensity, until the 17th century. The climax of the greatest destructive ferocity is not, as is commonly believed, during the Middle Ages, but in the fifteenth century, in the midst of the Renaissance. The return to classical culture. It's kind of hard to digest, but that's how it was. According to Jürgen Sorges in the book Roma. Art and Architecture , «Pope Nicholas V (1447-55), allowed 2,300 shipments of travertine and marble blocks to be taken from the Colosseum in a single year. He also looted the Circus Maximus and the temple of Venus and Rome… ”Sorges in the same text cites Pope Pius II :“Your people strip the marble from the old walls and turn the valuable stone into lime of poor fate. If this desecration continues for another three centuries, no trace of these noble stones will remain ”. This Pope sounded the alarm and legislated with a bull of 1462 for the protection of monuments. But the destruction did not end there, the following Pope repealed the bull and in the 16th century we hear voices in favor of protection, such as that of the painter Rafael . In the middle of the 17th century, during the pontificate of Maffeo Barberini, Pope with the name of Urban VIII (1626-44), we find one of the last plundering and the most famous, when he ordered to remove some bronze plates from the Pantheon, and with that metal Bernini would create the baldachin of Saint Peter. A couplet would emerge in Rome after the events:“what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did ”.
Despite the continuous destruction, from the 16th century the collector fever of classic works began, thus producing the first archaeological excavations in search of vestiges for both private and public collections. In addition, we find other curious a posteriori uses given to ancient Roman monuments. In the first place, the reuse of old spaces, such as the Pantheon converted into a Church in the 7th century and hence its preservation intact, or the old Baths of Diocletian, also transformed into the Church of Santa María degli Angeli by Michelangelo. However, the most common was to serve as foundations for modern constructions. Almost all churches have them, since many used to be built on a temple, for example, the name of the church of Santa Maria sopra (above) Minerva makes it quite clear. The layout of Pompey's theater is preserved in the current urban planning, and all the restaurants in the area boast of having "caves" belonging to the old theater. They are not caves, but part of the theater itself that have remained below the constructions of today. At number 49 Piazza Navona, and if one finds the portal open as it is a residential building, on the landing one can see the remains of the ancient Stadium of Domitian, which are also visible from the rear Piazza di Tor Sanguigna square. In the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, part of its paving belonged to the gigantic sundial (where the shadow was projected) built by Augustus in Campo Marzio, and the obelisk in charge of projecting the shadow to know the time is located next door. Piazza di Montecitorio. The Arch of Constantine would serve as part of a fortification, as would the Circus Maximus. Marcello's theater became the Savelli palace, remodeled by Peruzzi, a famous 16th-century architect. He kept the first two floors of the theater façade and on the third he created a façade with windows. The mausoleum of the emperor Hadrian, was fortified by the popes during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and today we know it as the Castel Sant`Angelo. To imagine what Hadrian's original mausoleum would be like, just go to see Augustus's, which followed the same typology. Finally, one last case and perhaps the best known, that of a sewer cover turned into a tourist attraction with divinatory skills, la Bocca de la Verità .
Rome is a fascinating city. There are many cities in one:the Rome that we see, the Rome that we do not see at first sight but that is hidden and the Rome that has disappeared.
Collaboration with Rafael Heranz .