Category Archives: Roman

The World’s First Shopping Mall?

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Shopping malls or, as they are known in Italy, ‘centri commerciali’ are often accused of closing down the individual shops which traditionally dominated our high streets. With their car-parks, protection from inclement weather, their one-stop shopping possibilities and their faciities such as bars, restaurants and movie theatres it is small wonder that the ‘centri commerciali’ have taken so much trade away from old-style street-lining shops. I’ve discussed the very serious problem that is afflicting Bagni di Lucca’s shop-keepers in my post at https://longoio3.com/2018/10/04/whats-eating-bagni-di-lucca/ .

Let’s not blame America for the rapid proliferation of shopping centres in Europe and Italy. London’s Brent Cross, Westfield and Dartford’s Bluewater all have European origins. Bluewater’s architecture, in particular, I found stunning enough to merit a poem :

BLUEWATER

Blue water lap me under zodiac’s dome,

enring me within the sphere of my sign

encompass eyes below crests of whitest cliffs;

inside your silvered pavilions cover

my being with bright tellurian riches,

join me in dances on coralline floors,

interpret inscriptions on the vast frieze

raising hearts to thoughts greater than they know,

breathe the argentine trellis of roses,

run your fingers down deep eastern forests

while pacific pines shade estuary suns;

make me forget this is just another

bloody shopping mall, stuck in a quarry

and I cannot pay off my MasterCard…

(Bluewater Shopping Centre, Dartford Kent)

Before the modern malls there were the Victorian covered markets. No visit to London would be complete without a window-shopping stroll down Burlington arcade

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or Leadenhall market, and there’s nothing to beat Milan’s extraordinary example of architectural eclecticism, its stunning Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II, otherwise known as the ‘Salotto’, or salon, of Milanese society. Here is the galleria on my visit to it in 2009.

But let us go further back in time and enter a shopping mall that was built almost two thousand years ago and which still has its shops intact, though now no longer a functioning ‘Centro Commerciale’ but a magnificent example of Imperial Roman architecture at its most imposing.

Trajan’s semi-circular market is just part of the grandest of all the imperial fora. Funny things may have happened on the way to the old Roman forum but, with the passing away of republican Rome and the heralding of the age of the imperial city, the old forum became, frankly, too small.

(The original Roman Forum)

Successive emperors build new fora, not only to add to public meeting spaces but to mark their place in history, Of these the most distinctive are those of Caesar, Augustus, Nerva and, most superlative and extensive of all, Trajan’s Forum, designed by Apollodorus of Damascus around 100 A.D. and celebrating the emperor’s conquest of Dacia, modern day Romania,

In its glory days the forum looked something like this:

The complex comprised a public square, a basilica, a temple to the deified emperor, the famous column with spiralling reliefs of the conquest of the Dacians and the world’s first ‘Centro Commerciale’ or shopping mall.

The market museum (opened in 2007 and beautifully set out) gives one of the best ideas of what everyday life in imperial Rome must have been like. Trajan’s mall would have made a welcome change from the narrow canyon-like streets that characterised most of ancient Rome and exist to this day:

The new market would also have provided easier access for the delivery of goods and foodstuffs.

There’s so much to take one’s breath away here: from marble floors, to amazing concrete and brick vaulting, the library and a balcony from which one can enjoy some of the best views of Rome. All I missed were the ancient Roman themselves and the multifarious smells of market goods. What a wonderful place to, at the very least, have held a Christmas market. After all, this beautiful shopping mall was built during the birth of a new religion, Christianity.

But let my photos show something of the atmosphere of this Roman ‘Brent-Cross’ shopping centre:

 

Who knows? On-line shopping could clearly make even the shopping mall a relic of the past, After all, why even bother to lift yourself from the comfort of your armchair when you can peruse all your big shops and compare prices at the drop of a digit.

Meanwhile……

 

Merry Christmas – Buon Natale!

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My Nine and a Half (So Far) Visits to Rome

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If Italy is written in my heart then Rome is inscribed in my soul. They say all roads lead to Rome and certainly all roads in my life lead there. Rome, for me, led to an awakening at a critical age in my existence, an awakening which shall never be erased from my consciousness as long as I live.

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My first visit to Rome was as an eight-year old in the company of my Italian grandparents. They impressed upon me the sacred nature of the Campidoglio; I was overwhelmed by the Colosseum, so much larger does it seem to a little lad than when one grows up. I have vague recollections of Saint Peter’s Rome but many other visual memories have faded. Later, I thought I might have been too young to have appreciated Rome at that age but I was assured that I thoroughly enjoyed my first visit to the eternal city.

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My second visit to Rome was at the age of fourteen. My mother (born in Milan, Rome University student and  naturalised British through her marriage with my English father) had arranged for me to stay with a family who lived in Rome but were  spending their summer in their seaside apartment at Ostia. Most days I would board the train at Ostia and alight at stazione Ostiense with a Blue Guide and tackle different parts of the city to visit. In January of that year I’d broken my leg in an accident on ice at school. The bone had not set properly, had to be re-broken and re-set, this time with a metal rod which was never removed. During my month at King’s College hospital I’d received visits from my class mates and, what with getting books from them and listening to the hospital radio, my being was opened up to the extraordinary world of music, painting and architecture.  A present of Bannister Fletcher’s ‘Architecture on the comparative method’ from a doctor friend was my constant reading and I was mesmerised by the plans of Imperial Roman forums, the great gothic cathedrals, through renaissance palaces to the start of the modern age of buildings.

 

 

So, for this second visit to Rome, which lasted weeks rather than days, I was rather better prepared than my first. Indeed, never, in any subsequent visit to Rome have I seen so much and walked so extensively. I remember calling in on a convent on the Appian Way when my several blisters had burst and having my feet bandaged by a nun. Another time I was offered peaches and Frascati wine as a lunch snack in a friary near the catacombs under San Lorenzo fuori le mura – and returned to Ostia and my host, who was amused by my first somewhat tipsy state. At the baths of Caracalla, so beloved by Shelley and where he was inspired to write his greatest work ‘Prometheus Unbound’, I witnessed my first opera, ‘Aida’ complete (naturally) with elephants. No photos but several guide books from this visit.

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***

Years passed before I returned to Rome a third time and then, rather like Goethe’s second visit, (his’ Italian Journey’ describing his first visit remains one of my favourite books) I found disappointment in the city. It was winter and I remember eating in a trattoria by Saint Peter’s square but never actually wanting to enter into the great basilica itself. The façade was near, closing the wonderful key-hole shaped Bernini colonnade but my feet refused to climb the stairs into the centre of western Christianity. It was a strange time in my life when I’d decided to escape from the comfortable world of academia and become a labourer in England, working on a motorway building project. No pictures, again, from this visit.

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When did I visit Rome, for the fourth time? It was in 2006 when I decided I would base myself in our little house in Longoio. It was an organised coach trip to see a Manet exhibition at the Vittoriale and where I also managed to see another on eighteenth century Roman art at the palazzo Venezia. I remember a strong, cold wind blowing all the time, a view from a little park where children were playing football in sight of the Colosseum, a walk past the Theatre of Marcellus and the placing of my hand in the Bocca della Verità, or mouth of truth. Fortunately my hand was not bitten off!

 

 

***

The fifth time was in 2008 in the company of an old uni friend who had bought a house in Anticoli Corrado, a village famed for the beauty of its women who are used as painters’ models.  This was a great walking tour starting from the Piazza del Popolo going down the Corso and then stepping up to the Janiculum past Bramante’s tenpietto and walking the length of the hill which offers the finest views of Rome. Spot the Pantheon, Trastevere, the Anglican church and Keats’ house below?

 

 

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The sixth visit took place in 2011 when my wife and I met up with ex-school-mates and their wives. We joined them at the Piazza dell’Esedra after taking in a very comprehensive view of the national museum in the baths of Diocletian.

 

 

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Should I include a fleeting visit changing trains on my way to Rome airport to catch a plane to Vietnam? My post on that is at:

A Solution to Miserable Weather

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Then in 2014 our local choir of Ghivizzano was invited to sing in Saint Peters. Details of this seventh visit are described in my posts at

Our Choir Sings at Rome’s (and the World’s) Greatest Church

From Peter to Paul

Two Kinds of Song

Remembering Goethe, Tasso and Anita Garibaldi in Rome

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Last year the choir of my old Cambridge College, King’s, sang in Saint Peter’s and, of course, I was there for my eighth visit. (See my posts at

Caput Mundi

Towards Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore

King’s College Choir Arrives at Saint Peter’s Basilica

Castling in Rome

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This year I could not miss yet again meeting up with another ex-school-mate, now living in the USA with his American wife and whose visits to Italy and Europe I had avidly been following on facebook.

Some posts of this latest visit are at:

Happy Cats in Rome

Beware the Ides of March.

Terminal Infection for the Greatest City in the World

The World’s First Shopping Mall?

That makes nine visits (and a half?) so far to Rome, each one quite different from the other. But as they say ‘Roma, una vita non basta’. (A lifetime is not enough to visit Rome). I would undoubtedly add that I’d need nine lifetimes to visit Rome rather than nine visits but then I do not have the advantage of being a cat.

 

Happy Cats in Rome

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Where would Rome be without its cats? Ancient fallen columns and pediments would not be the same without  the eternal city’s felines sunning themselves among the ruins of imperial temples and fora. Yet there was a move by the authorities not too long ago to cull moggies as it was thought that they lowered the tone of the city!

Fortunately, there are many more cat lovers than cat loathers and protests took place. Volunteers came forwards to help protect the eternal city’s felines, inoculate them against FIV, feed , clean, sterilize them to keep their numbers under control, re-house and find them suitable adoptions. (It’s even possible to distance-adopt a Roman cat!).

One of the most characteristic places to enjoy Roman cats is among the ancient ruins of Largo di Torre Argentina. This is an area in the heart of the city which was part of a major slum clearance project in the 1920’s. By chance,  (as usually happens in Rome if anyone starts digging – most famously tunnelling that new metro line…) ancient temples were uncovered belonging to pre-imperial Rome together with part of Pompey’s theatre which, you may remember, was where Julius Caesar was murdered by Brutus, Cassius and their conspirators.

Stray cats were glad to have found a new open space through the generosity of archaeologists and began convening there in such large numbers than in 1929 volunteers decided to set up a cat-shelter.

It’s been often touch and go for the shelter’s survival. Happily, when I visited it on my recent visit to Rome I found it to be a thriving and cheerful place.

I think I would like to be a Roman cat in my next incarnation! Imagine getting free board and lodging among the splendid classical ruins of perhaps the world’s most beautiful city and receiving all the love I needed from devoted volunteers and generous visitors, one of whom will always be remembered for she was none other than that greatest of Italian actors, Anna Magnani who always visited Largo Argentina to feed her beloved cats between film shots.

PS If you can’t be in Rome do at least visit the cat sanctuary web site at https://www.gattidiroma.net/web/en/  

Even if you are not a cat-lover the site has lots of invaluable historical and archaeological information.

 

 

Una Palazzina Romana a Londra

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Ci sono certi ruderi dell’età romana a Londra che si possono visitare soltanto col permesso speciale. Uno di questi è la magnifica casa di un ricco mercante che se la costruita sul lungo Tamigi. Annesse a questa casa, ci sono delle terme con un sistema d’ipocausto, con la quale la dimora era riscaldata dal sotto del pavimento.

Certo, qui non si parla di un’Ercolano, particolarmente perché di mosaici e pitture murale non ci sono tracce. E’ commovente, però, intuire che gli antichi romani, nel sovente lugubre clima delle isole britanniche, non volevano essere senza i loro confort mediterranei, e la presenza delle terme erano una di queste. (Più tardi, al tempo di Shakespeare, è raro se uno si faceva il bagno una volta l’anno – anche se diceva che non c’era bisogno di farlo!)

La casa l’abbiamo visitata tramite una scalinata che porta nel sottoterraneo di un ufficio davanti al vecchio mercato di pesci di Billingsgate – un sito appropriato poiché i romani amavano i pesci e la salsa fatta con codesti animali ittici. Chissà se il vecchio mercato di Billingsgate fu fondato dai romani?

L’entrata alla palazzina non è certo romantica come quelle a Pompei. Tuttavia la casa è grande quanto due campi da tennis e doveva essere veramente imponente. Qui potete vedere quello che rimane. E poi ci sono tante casse di reperti ancora da investigare.

Le ceramiche hanno mostrato che la casa fu eretta nel tardo secondo secolo e aveva un’ala nord e un’altra a est attorno a un cortile. Molto probabilmente c’era anche un’ala ovest ma nulla di ciò è sopravvissuto.

Nel terzo secolo è stato aggiunto un bagno nel cortile aperto nel mezzo del complesso. Aveva una stanza fredda, (frigidarium) una tiepida, (tepidarium) e una stanza calda (caldarium). L’intero complesso era in uso fino all’inizio del quinto secolo.

Diverse centinaia di monete della fine del quarto secolo sono state trovate negli scavi. Ciò è di particolare importanza giacché non si sa molto della fine della dominazione romana in Gran Bretagna e questa casa attesta un edificio di grandi dimensioni in uso fino all’inizio del quinto secolo. Tuttavia, la casa era probabilmente già in rovina entro l’anno 500. Una spilla anglosassone è stata trovata all’interno del materiale caduto dal tetto.

Che peccato! E pensare che si siano anche trovate delle anfore provenienti dalla Puglia e perfino dalla Palestina con olio vergine, un lusso che Londra si è solo permessa di avere con i suoi pasti negli ultimi trent’anni!

Le mie riflessioni su questa casa sono melancoliche. La vita quotidiana a Londinium era di un’alta civiltà che fu distrutta nelle così dette età oscure. Chissà se tra qualche millennio ci sarà qualche archeologo a riscoprire la strana cosiddetta ‘civiltà’ nella quale abitiamo ora? Chissà veramente…

Finisco con un’ impronta su una tegola della casa, al tempo ancora non cotta – quella di un gatto romano che ha deciso anche lui di fare parte della storia della grande città che è Londra:

 

Città di nubi:

un’ora nelle terme

li fa volar via!