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IV. OSTIA TO ROME, SEEKING PROFESSOR DARWIN
You hardly notice the drive in an air conditioned taxi from Fiumicino to Rome. It takes about 20 minutes, along superhighways typical of any modern city. This is a ride you’ll remember when you have to make the journey in a different age, and under vastly different conditions. This short ride can be a full day’s journey when Ostia was an imperial port--but that’s getting ahead of the story. Your mind is on autopilot as the taxi glides past billboards, highway exits, neon signs, and all the other mundane distractions of modern civilization. The driver knows his streets well. Soon you cruise among the buzzing Vespas and roaring buses, past fashionable store windows.
After a peaceful night’s sleep at a nice hotel amid the conveniences of the Castro Pretorio district near the British Embassy, you awaken refreshed. Castra Praetoria was the Praetorian Guard barracks on the outskirts of the ancient city. The Praetorians were the imperial bodyguards who sometimes appointed and replaced emperors at a dizzying pace.
You saunter down into the darkly marbled, luxurious lobby of your hotel. You buy a newspaper and exchange pleasantries with the snappy young college student in suit and tie who helps his family out by working the night shift. You wander through a stylish arcade of glass and palm trees into the subdued air of the dining room. Amid elevator music and linen tablecloths, you take a seat. A waiter serves what they call the American (with catsup) or English-style (with tomatoes) breakfast of eggs, meats, bread with butter and jam, juice, coffee, and optionally a cereal with milk, as opposed to a more austere Continental breakfast of toast and coffee--fare half unknown to people eating on this very spot long ago.
An hour later, you walk down the clean, breezy sidewalks. Modern Rome is a clean, busy city. Ruins are everywhere, sometimes just a few broken stones, sometimes entire arches and walls, sometimes entire ancient buildings that have been absorbed into more recent structures, which themselves have become blackened with age. Mostly though, Rome is a city of flowers and sunshine and green parks, of sparkling shops and fragrant pastries and stylish clothing. As you stride past store windows, you catch whiffs of this and that: fresh leather, fresh coffee, a barber’s pomade, whipped cream in a cake shop--all the enticements of a modern shopping mall. The city, furthermore, is crowded with tourists from around the world, including many Japanese. How odd, when you later think of it, to visit ancient Rome and be reminded of distant Japan--ancient Japan, at that--but that’s getting ahead of the story. You’ll strip away layers of Medieval and Imperial culture to touch the core of the ancient Roman soul, and you will be surprised at what you find.
You have a strange feeling as you arrive at a narrow side street hemmed between tall houses. It’s one of those older streets, where two cars can barely pass each other in opposite directions without at least one of them climbing with two wheels onto the sidewalk. This is a street (its name isn’t marked, and you aren’t clear what it might be) where sunlight never quite penetrates. Its orientation is north/south. Even at noon in the summer, the sun, striking fairly straight down from the south, is obscured by a drastic dog-leg turn about two blocks away. It’s a darkling street, though not an unfriendly one. You hear the laughter of young men and women passing by arm in arm. You hear the cries of children hard at play. Though you cannot see the bambini, you do hear their mothers, their grandmothers, a nanny or two, calling them by name. You hear parakeets twittering in a window, you hear rock ‘n roll music tumbling from a bar roiling with smoke and beer smells. It’s a neighborhood, more than a street, and the city seems distant here. You hear trucks and buses rushing on bigger streets just out of sight, but this is a street where a cat can cross, and stop in the middle of the street to hunch his back and yawn, looking left and right, before sauntering with leonine self-assurance onto the opposite sidewalk where his human mother has set a dish of milk for him by the travertine step. As you walk down this street, you are conscious of being watched. Elderly men and women, each in the enthroned isolation of a solitary windowsill, hover over the street with silently judgmental faces and eyes that never smile and do not miss anything. You smell the salt and nitrites of a fine salamme made of pork and wine and beef. You smell good food, coffee, clean linen as people air out their bedding on their windowsills in a style common through much of Europe. Though you feel at home in this little world, you have an uneasy feeling as you arrive before the heavy oak door, with its black and lifeless looking leaded-glass panes. This is Professor Luke Darwin’s town house. You use the heavy brass knocker, and you hear the echoes throughout the dark structure within. You try your cell phone, and you hear a distant ringing in response, but nobody answers your call. After waiting a few minutes, surprised and discouraged, you begin to walk away, thinking to return or call later. You hear a voice, and turn. Standing in the partially opened doorway is an elderly, dark-skinned woman with frizzy white hair, wearing a black house dress in the traditional manner of married women in Mediterranean Christian countries. The dress has a tomb-like, funerary modesty, or perhaps it has a widow-like quality of grief. "Nai?" the woman whispers, "Yes?" as if the mere act of speaking pains her. It takes you a moment to realize she speaks Greek, rather than Italian. Her eyes are so faded blue, almost white, that she looks blind. She looks delicate and bloodless, like some flower from a nether region. Worse yet, and more mystifying, you do not smell rich aromas of cooking--the house has a cold, tomb-like quality. You walk back and converse with the woman, who says she is related to Professor Darwin but does not elaborate. Does she know where he is? She shrugs and makes a vacant face. Does she know when he will be back? "Tre’ giorni," she says in shaky Italian, holding up three arthritically twisted fingers. Three days? There must be some mistake. No mistake, she says, come back in three days. "Can I call? Can I telephone?" you ask in frustration, but the door slips shut. You hear the lock turning in its well-oiled tumblers, and you hear one or two slippered shuffling noises before the house sinks back into its funereal silence.
You walk away, disappointed and angry, until you remember the list in your pocket. It is the e-mail Professor Darwin sent you, with suggestions for things to see in modern Rome so that you will better understand ancient Rome.
You have your choice of every conceivable mode of transportation, and you choose that most intimate and personal combination that is good in any large city: walking, and subways. Taxis and buses are clean, modern, and plentiful. You find it a bit anachronistic to whizz around the Eternal City in an air conditioned taxi while passing marred columns and statues from another age. Your spine tingles at the thought that this smiling nymph or that raging marble god at one time looked down on men in togas, women going to market with their slaves, children heading to school with their pedagogues. You pick up a little tourist map at a kiosk, where one can also buy and mail postcards, or acquire religious items like rosary beads, or knock down a quick beer. Rome is a cosmopolitan city today, accustomed to the constant passage of millions of tourists from around the world. Postcards come in many languages and alphabets.
The subway system has two lines forming a large "X" centered at the Termini railway station (which feeds trains to the entire city, including a direct line to Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, and to all of Italy). The system is among the cleanest in Europe, though one of the smallest and simplest systems for a modestly large world-class city of about three million. The greater city’s population around 300 A.D. was well over a million, while half a millennium later, in the dark ages around 800, it may have fallen as low as 20,000 (not counting robber clans infesting the many square miles of crumbling marble and overgrown wilderness), and a thousand years after that, around 1800, it was barely ten times its Medieval number.
The Blue Line runs roughly southwest to the right bank of the Tiber, running for some distance alongside the ancient road between Ostia and Rome. The Blue Line also runs northeast through the Castro Pretorio district. This rather upscale district, where you are staying, is named after the camp housing and training the Imperial Guard who at one time auctioned the entire empire off to the highest bidder, a real low point in up-and-down Roman history. You saw all this in the excellent 1964 movie The Fall of the Roman Empire, directed by Anthony Mann and starring, among others, Sophia Loren, James Mason, and Sir Alec Guiness. It really happened in March 193 A.D., shortly after the murder of the foul Emperor Commodus, and then the murder of the elderly Pertinax who had only ruled 87 days. During the night, while a mob carried Pertinax’s head about the city on a pole, two wealthy rivals appeared at the barracks (Castra Praetoria) and got in a shouting match, or a bidding war, for the loyalty of the Praetorians (who had become de facto emperor-makers in chaotic times). An auction ensued, with criers announcing the escalating bids from the fortress walls while the rest of the guard stood watch to stop either the city mobs or the police (urban cohorts) from intervening. You can imagine the scene: torches flickering in a slight breeze under an overcast night sky with drizzle and chill. Smoke hung in the air from looting and burning. The Roman mobs were ever an easily disturbed hornet’s nest seeking any excuse to riot. The winner was Didius Julianus, who paid a vast sum to become emperor, but was murdered a few months later as the empire descended into a three-way civil war that ended with the accession of a stronger emperor named Septimius Severus. His son was the notorious Caracalla, and it goes on and on like that. You see how it all went up and down as the ancient Republic with its virtues and constitutional practices grew ever more distant, and the wild excesses of unchecked imperial power ravaged the nation. Every inch of Rome is a repository of such stories, and they remain important to the modern world, because of Rome’s enduring impact on every corner of the earth. At least half the human race speak a dialect or derivation of ancient Latin (English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, Romanian). You see Graeco-Roman banks and government buildings on every continent. Every modern republic, including the U.S.A., is modeled on old Rome before she became an empire. Could history repeat itself? Will a mob carry some future president’s head around the streets of Washington, while generals, senators, religious leaders, and financiers haggle over the price of buying America?
The Red Line runs southeast, parallel to the ancient Appian Way, to, among other places, the great Cinecitta motion picture studios where modern myths have been spun around world-class actors by world-class directors (Marcello Mastroianni, Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, Carlo Ponti, Vittorio Gassman, to name just a few). The Red Line also runs northwest, crossing the Tiber not far from the Borghese estate, and terminating near the independent nation of Vatican City.
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