History Notes for Dad

Dear Dad, finally some pages for you since you said you preferred to share our History studies through our photos instead of plodding through ruins and crowds with your titanium knee. Nevertheless, wishing that you and Mom, our true History Major, could be here with us, with fond memories of celebrating your golden anniversary, all of us together in Rome, just 3 years ago!

A Quiet Archaeological Gem

[Saturday, 20 October] The Roma Crypta Balbi (translated; mapped) was a discovery of Jeff’s that I immensely enjoyed. It is nowhere listed in my guidebook from 2012, but certainly deserving of an entry. It is a quiet, modern museum, part of the Roman National Museums, that was built on the archaeological excavations of the ancient Roman theatre of Balbus (from the age of Caesar Augustus, around 1 AD) and its surrounding streets. We were among its very few visitors.

Underground, the museum exposes layers of masonry and other building remains, including plumbing, brick water reservoirs and sewers, latrines (c. 100 AD) and burial areas (c. 550 AD), constructed over centuries of occupation of the site. In medieval times (c. 1000-1200 AD), some of the ancient Roman levels had become the cellars and other structural elements of residential dwellings and baths.

The museum’s display panels on the upper-floor galleries painstakingly present the evolution of the street over time through maps, 3D drawings, photographs and artifacts–perfectly engaging for the closet archaeologists that some of us are. I only wished that there was a more comprehensive souvenir guidebook similar to the displays, for me to take home afterwards. A few photographs of the underground buildings follow.

On our way to the Crypta Balbi we serendipitously (yes, this should have been better planned by those professing to study Ancient Rome) found ourselves at the nearby Largo di Torre Argentina, the site where Julius Caesar was assassinated by Brutus. Marius had learned about Julius Caesar just the day before, and felt his assassination highly unjust.

Marius does think it is thrilling to learn about history on location.

The view over the railing.

The Crypta Balbi.

Looking East

Camera looking SW

Looking NW

The panel reads, “From the part of the cistern one glimpses a thousand years of history: the foundations of the eastern tower of the palace built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries over the sequence of early mediaeval streets. In the NW corner one of the pilasters supporting the vault of the tower incorporates fragments of wall blocks from the porticus Minucia.”

The visitor’s walkway runs above an old medieval street (now underground).

[From description:] “[Medieval] terracotta pipes brought waste water from the upper floors to the cesspools created by piercing the vaults of the ancient cistern.”