Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins

All roads lead to Rome including those from Calitri.  In fact, we can attest to it.  To get there from hometown Calitri, you can ride in Italian style aboard a sleek double-decker DiMaio bus.  Fortunately, the ride is nothing like Kathleen Turner’s character, Joan Wilder, experienced on her misguided trip to Cartagena, Columbia in “Romancing the Stone” with a squealing pig in someone’s arms.  No, nothing like that.  It’s not quick mind you, seeing it passes through town after town, but from about 7ish to 11ish it is a scenic ride.  It begins from the lot across from Amelia’s  

espresso - biscotti café in Calitri and continues on into the bedlam of Rome’s Tiburtina Train Station.  Oh, we don’t know all the ins and outs of the route, but we’ve done it enough that it has almost become routine.  On most occasions, we board the bus with some remorse for it both marks an end to our stay and the prelude to a long day of travel.  Just ask Maria Elena; She hates travel day.  But on one particular run, there was still adventure to be had.

We were not flying off for a few days yet.  When we arrived at “the end of all roads” in Rome, our plan was to stay over and follow another road, this time out of town, to visit the well-preserved archaeological remains of Ostia Antica, an ancient city close to the sea, the Fiumicino Airport, and the mouth of the Tiber River.  Fortunately for us, we knew just where to stay, Il Tulipano D’Oro, The Golden Tulip, a modern and comfortable four-star hotel, located only a few miles from the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport in Fiumicino.  Filled

with Italian hospitality, by all measure, it is a wonderful place to stay.  So, after rolling our luggage (thank God for that invention) from the bus to the taxi park, we were soon off, adventure underway.

There is something about arithmetic and taxi drivers.  Once, in notorious Naples, even after negotiating the fare with the driver beforehand, he refused to give me back my change and simply drove away.  The takeaway here is to have exact change or at least small bills!  It was about then that my abilities at bilingual profanity first began to emerge.  We’d made this run from Tiburtina to the hotel before.  The agreed to fare then was very reasonable, maybe too reasonable, because on this, our Ostia visit, it had doubled.  By the time the driver finished explaining why this was and how the previous “taxi” had to have been illegitimate, we had already passed through Rome’s Porta San Paolo gate in the old city walls and were well on our way.  My mind, however, was back a few miles wondering how to find that earlier driver again.

We had a gorgeous room at The Golden Tulip, this one overlooking an extensive garden complex and pool area.  Once we were settled in, we headed for the pool where we enjoyed what else

but Aperol Spritzes.  After all, if there was need for justification, it was in Rome where we had had our first spritzes.  Later that evening, we enjoyed dinner in their poolside restaurant.  It began with grilled octopus with barbecue sauce along with toasted bread with Burrata cheese and anchovies from the Cantabrian Sea.  It is amazing the number of seas carved from the Mediterranean.  The Cantabrian Sea, this sea part of the Atlantic, is the coastal sea that washes the northern coast of Spain, otherwise known as the Bay of Biscay.  The long and short of it, ours were Spanish anchovies being eaten just inland from the Med’s Tyrrhenian Sea.  While there were no claims on the origin of the

octopus, I’m voting for Polignano a Mare.  In fact, I think we know the guy who catches them (see earlier blog, “Part II, Polignano a Mare)!  Following these, I enjoyed a traditional dish of spaghetti with eggs, pecorino cheese, bacon, and black pepper.  Not to be outdone, Maria Elena, in a flashback to being wined and dined once again aboard our earlier Viking river cruise through France, took on Tagliata di Manzo con Olio al Basilico Nocciola e Spinacio Croccante, a rather long moniker for grilled Angus beef with basil flavored extra virgin olive oil and crispy Spinach.  Like marathon runners, we were certainly fortified for our outing the next morning to Ostia Antica.

The following day arrived with the bluest of skies.  We were given instructions on how to get to Ostia by the desk clerk.  Other than taking a chance on another taxi, we could first take a bus and then a train to the

Ostia archeological site.  For the moment we were done with expensive taxis.  Instead, we opted for the bus and rail mode.  As the hotel desk clerk had advised, we were able to purchase bus tickets at a small café down the street from our hotel compound.  I’m getting ahead of myself, but only later did I learn that we should have purchased round-trip bus tickets.  If by some miracle, however, we had been that prescient, the ending to this tale would have been entirely different.  Soon afterward, we hopped aboard the bus to the train station and from there were soon on a train to the next station up the line, conveniently located adjacent to the site.  Following a short walk through a housing area and finally a parking lot and we’d arrived at the Parco Archeologico di Ostia.Antica.  We purchased entry tickets along with audio guide headsets and were

soon on our way.  Before us stretched a long avenue approaching a mile in length, the Decumanus Maximus.  It ran through the heart of Ostia, heading toward the sea, just about parallel to the Tiber River.  Though frozen in time, this lengthy avenue was illustrative of the immense depth of time, then to now.  The sea and the Tiber are at once mother and father to Ostia, whose name derives from the fact that it was situated at the ostium (“os” being Latin for mouth) of the Tiber River.  Walking its length that day, in the cooling shade of towering pinea

“umbrella” trees, was an out-and-out walk through antiquity.  One of our challenges would be to try to understand the reality of what lay before us, the “then”, unencumbered by the perceptions and judgments of today, the “now”.

We had often talked of going to Ostia but never made time to visit.  Thankfully, time waited for us.  My first through last impression of the city was how well preserved it was.  As an added bonus, and unlike other sites we’ve visited, very little was fenced off.  We could understand it being referred to as “The Better Pompeii”.  So much is intact that Ostia Antica ranks as the best preserved Roman city in the world.  It is far larger than Herculaneum whose advantage lies in the many preserved homes, their walls adorned with dimensional art, mosaics, along with some furniture.  Ostia is more commercial in scope, where a peek at middle-class Roman lifestyle includes docks, bakeries,

shopping arcades, many baths, public toilets, warehouses, mills, in addition to private homes showcasing impressive mosaics and fresco “wallpaper”.

Additionally, there is opportunity to:

·         Near the beach, visit the ruins of the earliest synagogue yet identified in Europe constructed by the Jewish community of Ostia at the end of the first century.

·         Pick your seat among the tiered benches of one of the oldest theaters anywhere still in use.  This impressive 12 BC theater, built by Emperor Agrippa, its stage still intact, could hold 3500 spectators.  Today, the three-story backdrop to the stage is no more as are some of the plays presented there such as Ovid’s only tragedy,

     Medea.  Around 530 AD, the last inhabitants of Roman Ostia retreated to the theatre that had been turned into a small fortress.  As Ostia had been in the beginning, having grown from a military fortress in the 4^th century BC to defend against pirates, so it was once again a fort at the end.

·        

 ·      Close to the Tiber, walk the ruins of an early firefighter’s (vigils) barracks and the vital grain warehouses.  In 205 AD, the number of vigils in Ostia numbered 320 men whose duties involved not only fighting fires (some of which started as a result of an earthquake), but also police duties such as nightly patrols and the recovery of runaway slaves.  Under the Roman Republic, owners of slaves were allowed to inflict whatever punishment they wanted on a slave.  Runaways were therefore more than motivated not to get caught.  Slaves had no rights.  Perceived as mere commodities, not people, no punishment, including death, was considered criminal.

Ostia thrived until the 5^th century AD when on threat of barbarian invasion, it was hastily abandoned.  Just how quickly this occurred is anecdotally evident by the lack of any attempt to

remove valuable flour grinding machines.  Simply left behind, to this day a group of these rotating stone pillars, absent the wooden turnstile type arms used to rotate them, sit idle.  The city empty, it was soon forgotten.  In time, the city gradually filled with silt from the Tiber and was lost in memory for more than 1000 years until it was rediscovered in the 19^th century.  In its heyday, due to immigration and the import of slaves, it saw upwards to 100,000 inhabitants of which 20% were slaves, most likely doing for the citizenry, as we say, what no Roman was willing to do.

In the courtyard of the Guild of the Builders (Caseggiato dei Triclini) we came upon a large, intact series of toilets.  I have not seen anything that social, totally lacking in privacy, since my military days at paratrooper training, where much like the Ostia setting, you went to the “latrine” in a large open room among strangers.  In Ostia, it was at least possible that you might know the person next to you, a fellow guild member perhaps.  At this particular 20 “holer” a person sat on a marble seat above one of the holes, while to the front,

between their legs, was another hole to support a stick with a sponge at its end that was used like we use toilet paper today.  That was only the half of it, for you shared your sponge tipped stick with people on neighboring seats.  Talk about social interaction!  Water running through a trough in the floor in front of the patron was used to get your sponge wet and hopefully cleaned a bit before being reused.  Another trough beneath the seat also had water flowing through it to wash away the waste.  There was no evidence of olive oil dispensers (used as soap), some way to wash their hands, or anything approaching air fresheners.  A possible offsetting saving grace was the presence of an adjacent public bathhouse.

In an imperial city like Ostia, there was the ever-present need to wash and whiten clothing.  For this, the Fullonica (laundry) and its staff of slave workers (fullers) were on hand.  These laundries can be identified by the large open-air basins and three-sided horse stall like enclosures beneath shading roofs.  Fullers stood with their feet in pressing-bowls, usually made of terracotta. These bowls were filled with water and a mixture of alkaline chemicals.  It was the fuller's job to tread on and trample the clothes by jumping, something akin to dancing, while supporting themselves with their arms on the low

side-walls.  This action helped remove grease and enhanced colors.  They also employed urine as a bleaching agent collected in public urinals.  Urine was so important to the fulling business that it was taxed.  Stale urine was a source of ammonia salts and assisted in cleansing and whitening clothes.  Sulfur was also burned under wooden frames over which clothes were suspended.  The resulting fumes aided in whitening.  Fuller’s earth, what we today refer to as cat litter, was another important ingredient in the cleaning process.  It resembled clay in texture, absorbed oil, and grease, and served as a form of detergent.  The combination of old urine mixed with this clay dissolved grease and helped remove dirt.

These facilities lacked walls because of the chemicals employed.  They had little understanding of chemistry and even less concerning the effects of chemicals.  We can only imagine the stench from the use of these detergents and urine as the clothes were pummeled.  As could be expected, the health of the slave laborers was affected from prolonged exposure to these chemicals, especially to their limbs, which were daily bathed in a chemical brew.  Knee deep in tubs of human urine and repeated exposure to fuller's earth inevitably led to their feet and legs being exposed to bacterial, viral, and fungal infections.  Eczema with thickened, dry, inflamed and cracked skin was common as were severe respiratory complications from the daily exposure to burning Sulfur.  They were expendable, easy to replace.  The whitest whites thus came at a cost.  It must have been a hellish life with little to interrupt the day-to-day drudgery.  One diversion especially celebrated by the fullo workforce was Quinquatrus.  This annual event in honor of Minerva, the goddess of a thousand crafts, was a feast celebrated on 19 March with four more days to follow.  During this time the laundries of the Ostia fuller’s guild, called Corpus Fontanorum, were closed.  This in itself was enough justification to warrant celebration.

Down a street overgrown with summer grass, well off the Decumanus Maximus and past the laundry, we came upon a temple dedicated to the ancient cult of Mithras.  Only a simple sign identified it as one of the seventeen Ostian temples dedicated to this deity.  We’d run into another Mithraeum, a temple sanctuary of the cult of Mithras, in a second century, damp, pagan temple beneath the present-day Basilica San Clemente near the Coliseum.  It seems that the Persian god, Mithras, was popular with the Roman military, who introduced the mysterious eastern religion to the Roman capital.  Its mystery centered on participation being reserved only to inductees and the secrecy associated with the particulars of initiation and associated ritual practices, none of which could be revealed to outsiders.  The initiated called themselves syndexioi, those "united by the handshake".  To give it some present-day perspective, the ruins we came upon took the form of a lane in a bowling alley, a long, narrow, rectangular mosaic floor system decorated with the seven grades of initiation, one square at a time, one following another.  Unfortunately, other than for some passing references in Greek and Latin literature, no written narratives or theology from the religion survive.  Mithraism has at times been viewed as a rival of Christianity.  As the pagan Romans had sought to destroy Christianity, so the early Christians sought to quash Mithraism.  This may explain why their temples are commonly found underground and speaks to the secrecy of the cult.  What limited physical materials that do exist are derived from inscriptions, monuments, and artful depictions.  One very common scene presents the birth of Mithris from a rock while another depicts Mithris slaughtering a bull.  Their exact meaning remains a mystery and thus denied to us since after all, we do not know the secret handshake of the syndexioi.

The busy offices of sixty-one maritime-related companies bordering three sides of the spectacular grand plaza, referred to in Italian as the Piazzale delle Corporazioni, lying just behind the theater,

gives us a vivid glimpse into the city’s commercial activity.  These connected, side-by-side offices, on the order of a present-day strip mall, afforded one-stop business shopping.  Each of these rather small offices featured a mosaic entryway advertising the type of business services offered by that particular captain, ship owner, or trader.  An elephant might represent trade in ivory.  Several depict grain measurement since the import of grain from Africa and Sicily was one of the most important businesses in Ostia Antica.  Looking closely at one complex scene revealed the surprising presence of a swastika.  Many are amazed to learn that Adolf Hitler was not the first to use this symbol.  In fact, it was employed as a powerful symbol thousands of years before, across many cultures and continents from Hindus and Buddhists to the Greeks of Troy, Celts, and Druids, Nordic tribes, the Teutonic Knight Christian Order, including North American Navajos Indians.  We’d first become aware of just how

ancient this symbol was in the museum at Paestum where a Greek statue was ornamented with the iconic shape.  It was also interesting to learn that business deals would conclude with a sacrifice in the Capitolium, a temple dedicated to Juno, Minerva, Jupiter, Ceres (goddess of grain) among others, only steps away in the center of the Piazzale delle Corporazioni square, facing the back of the theater’s stage.  Because of the cosmopolitan multiethnic nature of the city, where people from all over the known world were present, the temple could accommodate just about anyone’s deity.  I can imagine the celebration afterward in the best known of Ostia’s taverns, the Thermopolium on Via Casa di Diana, today still complete with shelves, a counter, and a small sink.

Seeing the Thermopolium was closed and had been for thousands of years, we instead took a break in the shade afforded by a canopy of lofty umbrella pines surrounded by a countryside decorated with the relics of an empire.  With not a twittering soul about, without the modern distraction of automobiles, absent any wispy contrails from nearby Fiumicino Airport, and void of power lines to disturb the illusion, the solitude broken only by the timeless song of cicadas, now as likely as then, it was easy for my imagination to drift and take me back to an earlier time …

Felix couldn’t help but re-examine his situation.  In the refreshing tranquility of the early morning, as he swept the mosaic floor at his feet, he’d often used this time to think.  He was that type of a person, rare in a slave – cautious but always looking for opportunity to advance a little, very little it seemed, then stop to take measure of his circumstances.  Most of the slaves he knew, like those from the nearby fullonica, lived life by rote and were content to simply survive but he hadn’t given up, not yet.  His name, Felix, meaning “Happy”, was the most common of slave names.   He certainly appeared happy for a cemented smile across broad lips helped put people at ease.  When he’d been bought by his master, his striking features and the pleasing natural lay of his face had thus earned him the name, as common as it was.  Nevertheless, there was nothing common or every day about him.  Vastly tall with a brawny frame and olive skin put him in the vicinity of good looking - an amalgam of strength and attractiveness.

Still relatively young, he held fast to the dream of manumission.  His thoughts regularly entertained the dream, “Ah, to be a freedman, to be master of yourself.”  It was a dream big enough to sustain him.  Indeed, it was a strange phenomenon, like the transformation of men like Emperors into gods, here a metamorphosis from lowly slave to full-fledged citizen.  He couldn’t quite think in Latin yet, his inner voice still spoke Egyptian, something about the way the tongue had to maneuver to be able to produce those brief, sharp, Roman sounds.  He would continue to adapt and conform to the new ways.  He had already replaced his gods with the Roman pantheon of gods, especially Mithra, a favorite of his master, Septimius.  The Dominus was a stocky bulldog of a man, fair, but tenacious as a pitbull.  He was someone well suited for this tough, competitive, no-frills town … all business, built on sweat labor, and a “just do your job” attitude.  Best keep him happy.  Felix had learned this quickly since arriving from Egypt four years earlier.  So far, diligence, conscientiousness, and his agility with numbers had gotten him this far, assisting in his master’s office.  He just might be able to get by, even grow old as a freedman, if he could continue to please the Dominus.

He swept that morning with an added earnest, for today, his master’s backers in his import business would visit to help them decide whether to provide additional funds to expand his horreum, the warehouse bordering the Decumanus  Maximus, needed to store the ever-growing demand for grain, olive oil, and wine before they could be moved to Rome on barges pulled by oxen.  One of the two aediles, Sextus, who supervised the markets, standard weights, and measures would also attend.  The master was clever to have secured his attendance.  It would confirm to his backers his influence here in Ostia.  After all, they were free to invest in other businesses, many of which surrounded Felix there in the Piazzale delle Corporazioni.  The office now in order, he hurried into the warehouse.

When he arrived, Felix discovered Master Septimius issuing orders, making final adjustments to the imported samples that had been prepared and model of the warehouse additions, ensuring all was in order before his guests arrived and the warehouse tour began.  Great bins of grain marked with date and source filled this particular room while giant urns of oil and amphorae containers of wine filled adjacent rooms.  All appeared in order following days of preparation, which the Gods, all of them, would gladly attest too.  Then the noise began, a distant, paltry sound at first, but like none Felix had ever heard, along with a quiver that quickly grew to a shudder as the floor began to shake.  As they increased in intensity, coming again and again, maybe a fourth time, portions of the ceiling began to fall as a web of fissures appeared in the stone wall behind the Dominus that held back a sea of grain.  An instant later, in a rush without further warning, the wall gave way and grain burst from its confinement to quickly flood the room.

Its movement was so fast and the volume so vast that in moments, even before Septimius could turn to investigate the growing crack, it had engulfed him, burying him alive in grain.  Everything happened quickly, so rapidly that Felix, who steadied himself holding fast to a column, could later not explain how he managed to avoid the fate of his master, although his distance from the breach had certainly helped.  While scrambling to survive, he fixed on the spot through the murky fog of dust suspended in the air to where the Dominus had disappeared following his being thrust across the room.  The motion stopped, the sea of grain now static, Felix crawled and squirmed to the spot and feverishly began to dig in a race to the bottom.  A fury surged in his hands.  It was a blind business as he dug and desperately continued to dig against collapsing sidewalls until nearly emptied of strength.    Feet below the surface, an arm appeared which spurred the ferocity of his tunneling, only to result in uncovering his masters head.  As Felix cleared his face, Septimius opened his eyes and mouth to the piercing sigh of escaping air.  Death had been avoided by mere inches.  As he spit and gasped to breath, the first image burned into his mind was that of Felix, his slave, his smiling slave, staring down at him.  His first thought, “I’m alive thanks to the gods and most certainly because of this slave.  As I am freed, so he shall be.  A life for a life.”  How suddenly the Fates had stepped in and altered the destiny of both master and slave.

… My whimsical vision of the past complete, the Roman god of dreams, Morpheus, left me for the reality of the present.  Once again as the song of the cicadas continued at full bore, there among the bones of an empire, the beautiful ruins of a frayed red brick world enveloped “me.

Time to leave, we reversed our steps and returned to the Ostia Antica train station where we caught the train back to where the bus had dropped us off.  Arrived, we were surprised to discover that we had to take a train to the Stagione del Lido in Ostia proper to get a bus back to our hotel.  A station policeman was nice enough to explain that the Lido station was the only place where we could get the necessary bus tickets.  It seemed odd that one station would sell the tickets while another wouldn’t.  So we backtracked in order to switch our mode of transportation to go forward.  Now in helpful full-service mode, our good Samaritan policeman hopped aboard and brought us to the ticket window at the next stop, explained which bus to take, and told us where to wait.  It was a rather long wait as buses of assorted numbers, none of which was ours, came and went.  I would swear that some made their rounds a few times before eventually ours appeared.  For good measure, we confirmed it was the correct bus with our guardian angel and as we pulled away I shouted to him, ”Come ti chiami?” (What is your name?) to which we heard him reply, “Felix”.

From That Rogue Tourist

Paolo