We The Italians | Italian art: What emerges from excavations in Rome

Italian art: What emerges from excavations in Rome

Italian art: What emerges from excavations in Rome

  • WTI Magazine #96 Oct 14, 2017
  • 1325

During the last two years, also thanks to the many excavations for major urban works, numerous archaeological finds of great importance have re-emerged in Rome. The C line of the Roman subway has arrived near the historic center and even before entering the circle of the Aurelian Walls, the route excavated by the moles has brought to light several surprises.

Near the San Giovanni stop, the largest water basin of Imperial Rome has been found, 35 meters wide and 70 meters long for more than one hectare of surface. It was a large collector of water coming from the Crabra Water, useful for the irrigation of a large farm just outside the walls at Porta Asinara.

The company stopped operating completely at the end of the first century AD: masonry and hydraulic structures were shaved and buried. The phenomenon could be linked to a decision by Frontino, which was appointed Curator Aquarum in 97 AD by Emperor Nerva. Frontino (the main source of knowledge regarding the aqueducts of ancient Rome) denounces the "distribution of Aqua Crabra by the fountains of Rome." "I have blocked Crabra," writes Frontino, "and I have given it back to the people of Tuscany by order of the emperor.

After crossing the square where Via Appia starts, the excavations came across a barracks of the Adrianea Age. This is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of recent years in Rome: more than thirty rooms articulated along a corridor and decorated with wall frescoes and mosaic floors. The remains of the Roman barracks have emerged at 9 meters below the current road level, a depth in which it is practically impossible with current instruments to predict the presence of ancient structures. We therefore need a real excavation, which this time has reserved us a wonderful surprise: part of a barracks from the first half of the second century AD, abandoned when, in the third century, the Aurelian walls were built and whose memory had been lost. The barracks are part of a real military quarter, which gravitates towards the campus martialis which corresponds to the current Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano. On the sides of a corridor more than 100 meters long there are 39 rooms, of which 25 are 16 square meters wide and can be identified as military lodgings. Some rooms have mosaic floors with geometric designs and simply frescoed plaster walls.

On February 26, 2017, continuing along Viale Ipponio, the remains of two rooms were found in a house belonging to a wealthy family, victim of a devastating fire which, however, preserved wooden beams, part of the furniture and, in a corner of one of the rooms, the fossil remains of a dog. Under Piazza Celimontana, at the Celio, a piece of Roman aqueduct was found during the excavations of the ventilation well towards the Colosseum stop. The construction of the aqueduct can be framed in a period just before the middle of the third century BC, a chronology that refers to the only known aqueduct of this period: the Anio Vetus (272 BC). There are reasons against this attribution, however, for the fact that the Anio Vetus, according to Frontino, does not pass through the Celio, and for altimetric problems. Among the most plausible hypotheses, it is possible to identify this discovery with a stretch of Aqua Appia, the oldest aqueduct in Rome (312 BC), which crossed this district at a depth of 17 metres.

The stations of San Giovanni and Ipponio will be museum stations that will exhibit the finds found during the excavations. And we are only at the first stretch under the historic center of Rome ...