The postclassical histories of Ostia and Pompeii have already been described in the chapters on those cities; in each case, the active life of the city was cut short in antiquity, preserving its ruins. The history of Rome after the Roman Empire, however, is a very different story and is one that deserves at least a brief retelling. Rome has been continuously occupied from antiquity to the present, and the city has been repeatedly rebuilt so that today it consists of innumerable layers, some of which overlap and others of which are superimposed on top of one another. To a large extent, the history of the ancient ruins of Rome from antiquity to now is a survey of destruction, decay, and intermittent attempts to recover or restore monuments.
The beginnings of Rome's decline within the Roman Empire might be ascribed to the actions of the emperor Constantine, who founded a new, second capital city for the empire at Constantinople in the East in the early 300s AD. From this point on, Rome would at best serve only as the capital of the western half of the Roman Empire, and even this role would soon be lost. At the time of Constantine, Rome was still a huge and prosperous city, with a population of probably around three-quarters of a million. In the fifth century ad, the strength of the western empire declined in the face of multiple waves of barbarian invaders. Partly in response to these threats, the later emperors of this century shifted their court from Rome to the northern Italian city of Ravenna. Ravenna was surrounded by swamps, with a sea on one side, which made it a more easily defensible city with a ready escape route.
In AD 410, Rome was captured by foreign invaders for the first time in
1,000 years when the Visigoths (Germanic barbarians), under their king Alaric, sacked the city. In ad 455, another barbarian group, the Vandals, occupied Rome. During the same period, the city was repeatedly menaced by the Huns. All these depredations caused the population to plummet, and by the sixth century ad, the great Roman buildings were being abandoned, and much of the city began to resemble a ghost town of ruins.
In the Middle Ages, the only thing that saved Rome from complete obscurity was the splendor of its ruins and the presence of the pope. Although the city had lost its political role as capital of an empire, it had a new identity as the seat of the Catholic Church. Many of the Roman structures that have survived to the present only did so because they were coopted by the popes and turned into Christian churches. Some of the most notable examples of this are the Pantheon and the Curia (the senate house).
Other Roman buildings were not so fortunate, however, and suffered plundering and destruction. As early as the sixth century ad, Roman structures began to be used as quarries from which builders stripped marble, bricks, iron, and other construction materials. The destruction of Rome's buildings proceeded with apparently no concern for the great works of art and architecture that were being irreparably damaged or even destroyed. Beginning in the eighth century ad and continuing for several hundred years, limekilns were set up in the Roman Forum itself, and their operators tore down marble buildings and flung the marble into the fires to be burned, producing lime. The lime fires consumed not only the marble walls, floors, columns, and decoration of buildings, but even priceless marble sculptures. The population continued to decline, reaching a nadir in perhaps the tenth or eleventh century. One author suggests that war, plague, and relocation at one point reduced the populace of the once-great city to a mere 500 people.
With the rise of the pilgrimage movement, there was somewhat of a revival of interest in the city, and religious pilgrims began to travel to Rome to visit famous places associated with the lives of fhe apostles and the early saints. This led in the twelfth century to the appearance of what were, in essence, tourist travel guides describing for visitors famous pagan and Christian sites and buildings, even suggesting recommended routes for walks through the ruins of the city. One of the most famous of these guides is the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, or "The Marvels of Rome." The information contained in these books often included misidentifications of ancient monuments and fanciful legends about buildings, but these were probably not that much worse than some of the stories that modern tour guides tell visitors to the city.
The Renaissance era, with its intense interest in classical antiquity, perhaps marked the beginning of a more rigid sysfematic study of the ancient city. Renaissance scholars and humanists scoured monasteries in order to rediscover lost works of Greek and Roman authors and began rudimentary archaeological excavations in their quest to uncover examples of ancient sculpture and art. One sensational discovery at this time occurred when diggers broke through the roof of the by-then completely buried Golden House of Nero. The well-preserved frescoes, mosaics, and artifacts that emerged heavily influenced Renaissance artists and architects.
While these early scholars were rediscovering and preserving artifacts of ancient Rome, other forces were continuing to promote the destruction of the ancient ruins. One especially significant example of this was the gigantic construction project undertaken by the popes to erect the enormous basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican. Much of this church was built using materials recycled (or plundered) from Roman ruins. In 1540, the pope condemned the Roman Forum and the surrounding area and issued permits to contractors that allowed them to demolish the Roman buildings in order to supply materials for his church. Wealthy Renaissance families competed with one another to see who could amass the largest collections of ancient statues, and there was a healthy trade in antiquities, prompting many profit seekers to dig about in the ruins, hoping to unearth a well-preserved work of art that they could sell.
As the classical styles uncovered by Renaissance scholars gradually spread throughout Europe, Rome became a standard destination for artists in training to visit in order to copy the ancient works of art. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, not only did artists continue to come to Rome to view the antiquities, but the city also became an obligatory stop on the "Grand Tour" undertaken by wealthy and aristocratic members of European society as a kind of finishing touch to their education. Poets such as Keats and Shelley and philosophers such as Goethe lived in Rome for extended periods to soak up the remnants of Roman culture.
Unfortunately, the city was again plundered by foreign invaders when the French sacked Rome in 1798 and made off with much of the accumulated collections of art. These were taken back to Paris, where they eventually formed part of the core collections of the Louvre. The French depredations sparked a new movement of concern for attempting to protect Rome's remaining cultural heritage, and in the nineteenth century there was once again a recrudescence of classical scholarship. This was the era of the great nineteenth-century historians and archaeologists who classified ancient texts, inscriptions, and works of art.
This movement also saw the foundation of national academies based in Rome and dedicated to the study of its antiquities. Among these were the German Archaeological Institute and the French School at Rome, which were eventually joined by the British School at Rome and the American Academy at Rome. All of these institutions are still present and active today.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Italy achieved independence and unification, and in 1870 Rome was declared the capital of Italy. This sparked a number of major construction projects, including the Tiber embankments, which finally protected the city from floods. In 1870, the population of Rome was still a modest quarter of a million people, and the inhabited portion of the city made up only a relatively small proportion of the area enclosed within the old Aurelian Walls. The renewed pride in Italy's present fostered interest in the city's past, and notable Italian archaeologists such as Rodolfo Lanciani systematically surveyed the ruins of the city and oversaw ambitious excavations.
As the seat of government of a unified Italy, the city became known as Roma Capitale, and the desire to commemorate its new status led to some unfortunate projects, most notably the construction of an enormous and ugly monument to King Victor Emmanuel II. Like some sort of hideous wedding cake run amok, it is an enormous, multilayered, marble monument built in a mishmash of conflicting architectural styles, including pseudoclassical, Greco-Roman, Etruscan, Italic, Renaissance, and Baroque. It was erected at the heart of the city, beginning atop the east side of the Capitoline hill and cascading down toward the Roman Forum. Sadly, its construction obliterated much of the hill and its ancient monuments.
The rise of fascism and Mussolini in the 1930s prompted yet another round of both interest in ancient Rome and destruction of its monuments. Mussolini had grandiose dreams of founding a new Roman empire and self-consciously imitated Roman symbols and imagery to promote himself and his political agenda. Because of this, he was intensely interested in uncovering the remains of the ancient city and therefore initiated a number of major excavations.
Unfortunately, Mussolini was very impatient and not interested in minor artifacts; in his zeal to get at hoped-for monuments, many sites were literally bulldozed and thus destroyed. One of the most famous examples of Mussolini's methods stemmed from his desire to have a grand, straight boulevard stretching out from the heart of the city on which he could stage parades. This led to the construction in 1932 of a major road, known as the Via Dei Fori Imperiali, beginning at the Victor Emmanuel Monument and stretching off to the east. This road plowed right through parts of the Roman Forum and especially the Imperial Fora, burying and forever obliterating much of them. Recent excavations have begun the attempted reclamation of some of this historically significant area.
In the latter twentieth century, the population of Rome exploded. Today, it is a city of several million people and has become a major tourist site. The density of people living there and visiting the ruins has created its own problems, most notably related to air pollution. The fumes created by factories, cars, and other aspects of modern life not only have coated the surviving ancient monuments with a black layer of grime, but, even worse, have produced acid rain, which is rapidly eating away at and dissolving exposed ancient stones and sculptures. The often-shaky state of the Italian economy has made initiatives to protect and preserve these monuments controversial.
Despite this long history of destruction, the monuments built by the ancient Romans, such as the Colosseum, Trajan's Column, the Baths of Caracalla, and the Pantheon, are still impressive today, and their solid construction will hopefully ensure fhat they remain standing for some fime to come.
World History
