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III. FLYING INTO MODERN ROME
Your flight is in a modern, cozy jet that still smells of a good pasta dinner accompanied by robust, dark Chianti, followed by a long, leisurely capuccino coffee. You are excited to see Rome below. She sprawls across the floodplain of the Tiber--in the mouth of modern Lazio (ancient Latium and part of ancient Etruria) surrounded by the mountains that form much of the Italian peninsula.
Your cabin attendant is an attractive young woman with long black hair, dark eyes, and a flashing smile. She seems to take a special interest in you. The oddest thing about her: despite the crisp, beautiful uniform, she has donned a pair of really gross, floppy, hairy house slippers of a type commonly seen in Europe, in dark brown and earth color checks, apparently for comfort. One of the flight officers, a dark-haired handsome man in a similar crisp, navy-blue uniform, stops to chat with her a moment. They both look knowingly toward you. He moves on to the cockpit, while she leans close to adjust your pillow. Her large eyes have a knowing, comforting warmth that puts you at ease while she murmurs: "I will be with you the whole way. Is there anything else you need?" You notice her name tag, Amalthea, and forget it as soon as she drifts away to help other passengers. A hundred other things, from a jolt in an air pocket to a spilled creamer, divert your attention.
The clouds part as the plane begins its descent. The strange twilight in the passenger cabin brightens. A few last wisps of wet-looking marine layer slide away over the plane’s wing surfaces, and the sunlight of Italy gilds the horizon. A dreamy, peaceful light fills the cabin as the attendants clear the last bits of everyone’s desserts away. Seatbelts are fastened and the floor tilts noticeably under your feet as the plane begins its descent.
You observe the rocky topography of Italy below--mountain ranges dotted with volcanic craters and some of the world’s largest and most violently active volcanoes. Rome herself is surrounded by at least fifty craters. You see several huge lakes--Bracciano to the north, Albano and Nemi to the south, and others--amid torn and twisted mountain ranges. The whole region is geothermally active, as in ancient times.
Rome looks like any other modern city from the air-- a typical contemporary urban octopus. Under the factories, highways, suburbs, shopping centers, and parking lots sprawl ancient ruins. Layers of history coexist here.
Modern Rome proper, when you consider her suburbs and exurbs, probably occupies much the same area as the imperial city around 300 A.D. The city shrank to a village during the darkest Middle Ages. She was a vast haunted cemetery of marble and wild growth inhabited by animals and bandits, where nobody dared go between dusk and dawn.
Like many cities, she formed beside (mostly on the right side of) a river--the meandering Tiber, which winds gently from side to side through its flood plain on its way into the sea. The Tiber describes a letter "S" near the heart of the ancient city, and this will be the focus of your walk in ancient Rome. On the left bank (looking north) behind the upper curve is Vatican City (think St. Peter’s). Opposite that, on the right bank, is the Capitoline Hill with its Temple of Jupiter and the Temple of Juno Moneta, and beyond that the Roman Forum.
The upper or left bend of the S (we'll call it Left, although some historians call this the Right Bank) points to the Tomb of Hadrian and the Vatican Hill.
The lower or right bend of the S points to the Palatine (think emperors, palaces) and the Circus Maximus (think Ben-Hur, chariots). In the lower bend of the S lies an island shaped like a ship that, since the Middle Ages, has featured a travertine prow like a galleon’s on the northern edge pointing into the oncoming current.
Today, the city is defined not only by her river of water, the Tiber, but also by her river of traffic. The circumferential highway, or Grande Raccordo Anulare (GRA), makes a huge ring around the city. This flood of hurried lives and rush hour anxieties is understandable by urban dwellers anywhere in the world. Going into such cities in the morning, and leaving them in late afternoon, is a global ritual, a passage not under stained glass, but under glowing neon lights.
Two walls mutely describe the beginning and end of ancient Rome. The smaller is the Servian Wall, which defined the official city limits during the Republic. As the city grew in power and prestige, she outgrew this inner wall. The wall was already a relic even in ancient times.
For about 600 years, it was unthinkable that any invader could enter Roman space, but this changed by 270 A.D. Barbarians probing at the edges of civilization caused Emperor Aurelius to begin a huge new outer wall (the Aurelian Wall) of a perimeter measuring 19 kilometers (13 Roman miles, or 11.4 U.S. miles). This final wall was to be an ongoing project of the emperors for the next 200 years. Every ancient and medieval city but one had a defensive wall around it. The only modern city with a defensive wall was Cold War East Berlin. (Think also of the Maginot Line, defending France against Germany during the 1930s, but that was a fortification encompassing a nation; as was the Great Wall of China). Of all the cities in the Classical world, only Rome felt so sure of her power that she comfortably lay with her neck exposed to the world for over 600 years. In the late Third Century A.D., the Aurelian Wall appeared--a defensive complex 16 meters (over 32 feet, or almost three stories) high and ten feet thick, with 383 towers and 7,020 crenellations, five gates, 116 latrines, and 2,066 large windows. The wall's height was doubled in later years. Such statistics help give an idea of the massive scale of Roman engineering as well as the massive scale of the empire’s life and death. The circumference of that wall is comparable with that of the modern GRA, beyond whose outskirts lies luxuriant forest growth half hidden in late afternoon mist as your plane slowly glides to a landing at Fiumicino (Leonardo da Vinci International Airport).
As the plane circles the city to land, you catch a momentary pinkish gleam of late sunlight on vast expanses of simple but sturdy travertine marble, for this is the common building material of curbs and sidewalks, of traffic islands and many street signs, in use since the earliest days. You glimpse the distant dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, and the turrets and spires of a hundred other churches. Now begins the descent to Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, which many call Fiumicino, after a medieval village, or Ostia, after an ancient seaport of Rome.
Soon enough, your journey back in time will begin in Ostia--long ago Rome’s outlet to the sea, her grain warehousing center, and much more. The great modern airport was excavated in mid-20th Century near a village called Fiumicino. This sits on a treasure trove of ancient structures. Ostia (a Latin name, perhaps from the root os, meaning "mouth," which is the root of "oral" and "oracle") has been called "the other Pompeii." Pompeii and at least two other buried Roman communities (Herculaneum and Stabia) lie several hours’ automobile drive south of Rome (about five days’ travel in ancient times) and were buried by an eruption of powerful Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The busy seaport of Ostia, on the other hand, whose docks and warehouses served a million people, was drowned in trash and debris at first, then silted over as the Tyrrhenian Sea (part of the Mediterranean Sea) receded miles away; and finally built over throughout the Middle Ages. Forgotten until the airport excavations, Ostia today is museum, a haunted ruin with mosaic floors, shutterless windows, and narrow alleys still echoing with long-ago laughter. The casual visitor, of course, knows nothing of this as the sleek Alitalia airliner whistles proudly down to a landing amid ultra-modern terminals.
Soon enough, suitcase in hand, you stand on a moving sidewalk in the air terminal as you pass through long glassed-over corridors and out onto the concourse to take a taxi into the Eternal City.
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