🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 24
Rome has been continuously a major city
In the centre of Rome, scattered across nearly every neighbourhood of the historic city, are roughly twenty-five hundred cast-iron public drinking fountains called nasoni — “big noses,” for the curved spout that gives them their name. They run continuously, twenty-four hours a day, all year round, and have done so since the 1870s, when the new Italian state inherited the city from the Pope. The water in them is cold, faintly mineral, and entirely safe to drink. It is also, in a real sense, two thousand years old — not the water itself, but the system that delivers it. The Aqua Virgo, the aqueduct that feeds most of central Rome’s public fountains, was completed by the Roman general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa in the year 19 BC. The same aqueduct that fills the nasoni on Via del Corso this afternoon was filling the public baths of Augustus’s Rome in the year Cleopatra’s son Caesarion was executed. When the Trevi Fountain was completed in 1762, the architect Nicola Salvi did not need to find a water source. He plugged his sculpture into an aqueduct that was already running. The Italian government did not build a new water supply for Rome. It maintained Augustus’s.
This is the deepest fact about Rome and the one most casually-informed visitors never quite grasp. Almost every other European capital has, at some point in its history, gone through a long stretch of being something less than a capital. Athens shrank to a small Ottoman town for centuries. Paris was a Celtic-Roman provincial settlement and a series of medieval villages before it became Paris. London was a Roman provincial city, was effectively abandoned for several centuries after the Roman withdrawal, and only repopulated as a major centre in the late medieval period. Madrid was a small Moorish frontier town until the sixteenth century. Berlin was a thirteenth-century trading village. Rome did none of these things. Rome has been continuously a major city — never a village, never abandoned, never reset — for at least twenty-seven centuries. The city has been sacked by Gauls in 390 BC, Visigoths in 410 AD, Vandals in 455 AD, Normans in 1084, Imperial troops under Charles V in 1527, French troops under Napoleon in 1798, and taken in 1870 by the Italian army from the Pope to complete the unification of Italy. None of these events destroyed Rome. Each ended with the conqueror eventually leaving and Rome remaining. The city has been taken more times than perhaps any major capital in the world. The city has never been replaced. There is a difference.
The walls that defended the city through almost all of these events were built by the Emperor Aurelian between 271 and 275 AD, in a frenzy of three and a half years to cope with the growing barbarian threat to the late Roman Empire. The Aurelian Walls run nineteen kilometres around the historic centre, were originally six metres tall, and were raised to twelve metres a century later by the Emperors Maxentius and Honorius. They are largely still standing. They served as Rome’s primary urban defensive perimeter for almost exactly sixteen hundred years — from 275 AD until the 20th of September 1870, when Italian troops under General Raffaele Cadorna fired artillery against the wall near the Porta Pia and breached it in a stretch of about thirty metres. The breach, after a few hours of fighting, ended Papal temporal rule over Rome and finalised Italian unification. The breach is still visible. There is a small monument. The wall has been repaired on either side. The repair is the most recent significant act of military fortification in Roman history. The Aurelian Walls in 1870 were nearly two thousand years old, still standing, and still operationally relevant. The wall before the breach is older than France.
The Pantheon, in the centre of the old city, was completed by the Emperor Hadrian around the year 126 AD on the site of an earlier temple built by the same Agrippa who built the aqueduct. It is one of the best-preserved buildings of antiquity, and its dome, at 43.3 metres in diameter, was the largest dome of any kind in the world for the next thirteen hundred years. The first dome to surpass it was Brunelleschi’s in Florence, completed in 1436. The Pantheon’s dome was made of unreinforced Roman concrete, in a graduated weight from heavy basalt at the base to light pumice near the oculus at the top, in a recipe whose precise chemistry was lost after the fall of the Western Empire and only fully reconstructed by materials scientists in the twenty-first century. The Pantheon has been in continuous use for nineteen centuries. It was converted from a pagan temple to a Christian church — Santa Maria ad Martyres — in the year 609 AD by Pope Boniface IV, which is why it survived intact while every comparable pagan temple in Europe was either dismantled for stone or left to collapse. It is still a working church today, with regular masses, weddings, and funerals. Raphael is buried inside it. Two Italian kings are buried inside it. The world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, eighteen hundred years old, is also, this Sunday, a working parish.
There are thirteen ancient Egyptian obelisks in Rome — more standing Egyptian obelisks than in the entire country of Egypt. Most readers do not know this, and almost no other piece of information reframes the city quite as quickly. The obelisks were brought to Rome by Roman emperors who wanted to demonstrate, in carved stone, that they had subdued Egypt. Augustus brought the first two in 10 BC, after his defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium; they now stand in Piazza del Popolo and Piazza Montecitorio in front of the Italian Parliament. Caligula brought another from Heliopolis around 37 AD; it stood in his private circus on the Vatican Hill, was moved by Pope Sixtus V in 1586 to the centre of Saint Peter’s Square, and is the only ancient Egyptian obelisk in Rome that has been continuously standing since antiquity — it never fell, was never buried, has been upright for two thousand years on the same square mile of ground. The largest standing ancient Egyptian obelisk anywhere in the world is at San Giovanni in Laterano, brought to Rome in 357 AD and re-erected on a Christian platform in 1588 by Pope Sixtus V. It is thirty-two metres tall. It was originally erected by Pharaoh Thutmose III at the Karnak temple complex around 1450 BC. The hieroglyphs on its sides are still legible to Egyptologists. The obelisk is forty-six centuries old. The square it stands in is four centuries old. Rome does not respect time differences.
This is what Rome does. The water is Augustan. The walls are late Imperial. The Pantheon is Hadrianic. The obelisks are Egyptian. The piazzas are Renaissance and Baroque. The parliament is modern. The traffic is contemporary. All of it is in the same five square kilometres of the historic centre. All of it is in current operation. The Forum is a working archaeological site that runs on a maintenance budget. The Vatican is a working sovereign state with its own banks, its own newspaper, its own postal system, and its own diplomatic corps. The Pantheon is a working church. The Aurelian Walls are working pieces of urban infrastructure that municipal engineers still inspect. The Aqua Virgo is a working aqueduct. The Italian Parliament at Palazzo Montecitorio is a working legislature voting on this week’s budget. Roman civilisation did not end. It just kept layering. Most cities have a history. Rome has a system — a system that has been continuously in operation, somewhere on the same seven hills, for almost as long as anything in Europe has been continuously in operation. The history is not the past tense. The history is what you walk through on the way to lunch.
The Italian capital was not Rome at unification. Italy unified in 1861, but Rome was still the Papal States. The Italian government sat first in Turin from 1861 to 1865, then in Florence from 1865 to 1870, and only moved to Rome in 1871 — after the breach at Porta Pia. The city most fully synonymous with Italian civilisation was, in fact, the last major Italian city to formally become Italian. Rome had been a republic, an empire, an early Christian centre, a medieval papal state, a Renaissance court, a Counter-Reformation capital, and a Baroque pilgrimage destination — all without being Italian in the modern political sense. Italy joined Rome, not the other way around. The city had been governing itself, or being governed, for over two thousand five hundred years before any country called Italy existed to claim it.
Some cities preserve their past. This one is its past, still arguing with itself in eight voices, none of them resolved.
Nine regions. One hundred and twenty destinations. Three hundred and thirty-seven weeks remaining.
The journey turns north. The next stop is also Italian — but younger, narrower, and far less interested in being looked at.
Beyondia
Trusted Travel CompanionReal digital nomad. I travel. I learn. I grow.
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