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Ruins Under Rome
JULY 2006
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By Paul Bennett
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Photographs by Stephen L. Alvarez
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Sloshing through sewers and crawling down long-lost passages, urban adventurers investigate the mysteries of an ancient city.
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Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.
Far more common than planned expeditions to reveal Rome's hidden secrets are the chance discoveries: A work crew digs a hole in the street and cracks into a hollow underground space. Speleologists are called in, and yet another astounding find alters the picture. Such was the case on the Oppian Hill two winters ago when, after a period of intense rain, a hole spontaneously opened near a tree, exposing a matrix of underground rooms.
Marco Placidi, a coolheaded speleologist and a founder of Roma Sotterranea, was called in. Using ropes and harnesses, Placidi lowered himself into a dark, 40-foot-high (12-meter-high) room, which archaeologists believe was built sometime after Nero's nearby Domus Aurea ("golden house"), dating from A.D. 65, and sometime before the Baths of Trajan (circa A.D. 109), located above both of these structures. This room, it turned out, is one of the best preserved features from the Roman world, with meticulously flat brickwork and large arches. But for Placidi, the heart-thumping moment came halfway down, when, hanging in midair, he aimed his headlamp at the wall: On it was a mosaic, in perfect condition, showing a group of naked men harvesting and stamping grapes. The "Vendemmia" ("Grape Harvest"), as it was called, is some ten feet long and made of minuscule, vividly colored bits of marble and other stone. "When I dropped down into this hole, I never imagined I'd see something like this," Placidi says. "It was an immense joy."
To an outsider, the randomness of such discoveries is shocking. But for Romans, it is quotidian. In the course of going about his business, someone somewhere bumps up against an artifact that hasn't seen the light of day for hundreds—or thousands—of years. Every year, the city authorizes 13,000 requests for building permits, each of which requires archaeological evaluation. Construction of roads and sewers in Rome's ever expanding suburbs is years behind because the overwhelming number of finds stops work and throws budgets into disarray.
The city of Rome has been trying hard to extend a sewer to the Appian area in the southeast for the past three years but has made little progress, according to Davide Mancini and Sergio Fontana. They run a cooperative of archaeology graduate students called Parsifal, contracted by the city's cash-strapped archaeology office to monitor the work of dozens of construction crews. At any time, Parsifal may be overseeing up to 20 worksites, looking out for artifacts, reporting back to the government, and, if necessary, halting work to analyze finds. Traditional archaeology is painstakingly slow, but Parsifal's experts must be able to spot a precious object and assess its value in the seconds before the shovel plunges in.
On a typical day at the site, as Mancini and Fontana watch, a backhoe has to stop four times in a single half hour. A harried graduate student jumps into the muddy pit and tosses up treasure: a lamp, several plates and bowls, small terra-cotta sculptures, and countless fragments of amphorae—much of which might date from the third or fourth century B.C.
"This zone is a mess," Davide says. He explains that work began here in June 2003, expecting the project would take a few months. But completion is still nowhere in sight.
A few minutes later, the backhoe stops again. The student hops into the hole and sends up several very large pieces of amphorae, one of which has a glob of something stuck to it. Brightening, Sergio sniffs it. He says that it might be resin used to seal the amphora, a rare find. Davide disagrees. He thinks it might be incense, maybe from the amphora's reuse in medieval times. Regardless, the fragment goes into a plastic bag, which goes into a box next to dozens of other boxes that wait for the truck to take them to a warehouse. Meanwhile, the backhoe driver finishes his cigarette and asks permission to continue digging.
Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.
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