Subterranean Rome - an engineering feat from 2500 years ago

 

At one time, one could visit,
but would you want to?

  Rome's - if not the world's - most famous sewer showed up on our RST Top 40 list, admittedly at #40, almost 9 years ago. We're revisiting it today, because it fits into our you-can't-go-there-anyway category; in this case, because it's underground.

Better to view it from the outside, here, today, as it exits into the Tevere.

 The sewer, or Cloaca Maxima (also spelled Cloaxa, as we did 9 years ago, but Cloaca is more common, we've learned since) - meaning "big sewer" - was constructed about 2500 years ago, even before the Romans as we know them. It was designed to canalize water coming down from streams on Rome's 7 hills into the Forum. It ran straight through the Forum and was first open, with small boards as crossing points (must have smelled lovely).

In the photo at right is a reconstruction of what the Cloaca Maxima looked like during the time of the Tarquinian kings (6th century BCE).

When we wrote Rome the Second Time in 2008, we were fascinated by the large mouth of the Cloaca on the Tevere that one can still see today (it shows up in Itinerary 3: The Strange Career of the Tevere, p. 48 in the print copy) - see photo above,"Lo sbocco nel Tevere." There are many views of that 2500 year-old opening, including by Piranesi (etching below), who apparently inspired Goethe to visit the Cloaca in April, 1788. There's evidence Goethe was able to go inside the sewer, though we don't know if he entered it from the Tevere. 

There are more, quite lovely, paintings and etchings at the end of this post.  Amazing a sewer can be so inspirational.

We, who are always finding ways to tie Rome, Los Angeles, and Buffalo, NY, to each other, offer to tie at least Rome and Buffalo together with the tracing above ground of the waterway below-ground. The photo below shows the route of the Cloaca Maxima, above ground, as it would look today. Recently, Bill took the two of us on a route following an important creek in Buffalo, the Scajaquada Creek, where it was placed - a mere 90 years ago -  underground, but can - more or less - be followed above ground. 

So that's our challenge to our readers and to us the next time we are able - to follow the Cloaca Maxima's route above ground.  Part of that route, of course, still wends its way through the Forum, and one can today find evidence of it above ground there, as in this photo:

These (above photo) are the remains of a small "chapel" ("Sacello") to the Sewer Venus ("Venere Cloacina"), evidenced also in a coin of the period (photo right). 

Other fun facts.  Most of the sewer is in use today, 2,500 years later, although not the part that opens onto the Tevere. Etruscans started building it by carving into the very useful tufo (photo left). It was finally (!) covered over in the 2nd century BCE, as Rome grew and there was need for more space. Agrippa (1st century BCE) took a boat and explored it. 

People who were sewer-keepers were proud enough to have this on their tombstones (photo right). 

One of the San Sebastiano stories has him thrown into it. Left, Ludovico Carracci's 1612 painting of San Sebastiano being thrown into the Cloaca

Parts of the Cloaca Maxima are built with the classic Roman marble, travertine (tons used by Richard Meier to construct The Getty Museum in LA - see, I got LA in there - as well as the Ara Pacis structure in central Rome). Photo right.

There have been visits "down there" from time to time, including the photo at the top of this post from the 1960s, as I recall. Now, small robots are used to investigate the caverns, called "robotini" or "archeorobots" - photo left.

Most of the information in this post is from a Zoom lecture by Daniela Pacchiani, a specialist in ancient archaeology, as part of Turismo Culturale Italiano's Roma Inaccessibili ("Inaccessible Rome") series in January and February.

Dianne (more 18th and 19th century paintings below!)

This is a nice "capriccio" or fantastical image
of the Cloaca's opening onto the Tevere. It is 
not too far from the temple, whose ruins are fancifully shown here,
but which are obviously not exactly in this location.

More than the Trevi Fountain: Prosciutto, Palazzi, Prints and Paintings within a coin's throw.

The Trevi Fountain is definitely a Rome the First Time experience--and many more times after that, we think. So don't miss it.  (And some advice on visiting it below... it's not so simple these days.)

But there's more!
Three historic Renaissance palazzi, more than three free exhibition spaces, and great food abound in the small streets to the right and left of the fountain.

To fuel yourselves for fighting the crowds and police that now surround the fountain, try the mouth-watering, tiny prosciutteria off the piazza. I must admit I wasn't keen on meeting our family there, expecting something trending on Yelp or Facebook, with little local flavor.  I was so wrong, as the "before" and "after" photos illustrate. La Prosciutteria Trevi, via della Panetteria, No. 34,11 a.m. - 11:30 p.m.

Sonia Delaunay print

Now for some art.  The Trevi Fountain overwhelms everything near it; thus, it's understandable that three or more (depending on how one counts them) art exhibition spaces are almost on top of the fountain and yet usually quite devoid of visitors. Istituto Centrale per la Grafica - the Central Graphics Institute - is contiguous with the building on which the fountain is built.  Go along the street on the right of the fountain and you'll find the entrance on your left.  It has excellent shows.  We've seen many there - from Piranesi's fantasy prints to Sonia Delaunay's work.  Free.  Via della Stamperia, 6.

Piranesi - from his fantastica "jails" series.

Borromini's 17th-century frieze at
Accademia di San Luca, with an Ontani
sculpture in the niche inside.

This is one of several exhibition spaces behind the fountain. The main one is in Palazzo della Calcografia - an 18th-century building by Giuseppe Valadier.  A second one is in Palazzo Poli, with an entrance on the left side of the Trevi Fountain (as we recall), and which is considered to house the Trevi. Some of the space is devoted to a permanent exhibition of older print-making machines and explanations of the techniques then and today.  You might be lucky, too, as we were one day, to find yourself on the second floor of the palazzo and looking out the window right onto the fountain itself.

Across from Palazzo della Calcografia is the main building of Rome's exclusive arts academy - Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, founded in 1577.  In this palazzo, Palazzo Carpegna,you can simply walk in to see the famed Borromini ramp and friezes from the mid-17th century.  Prominent exhibits often are installed on the ramp and elsewhere throughout the building.  We've seen excellent architectural drawings by contemporary Italian Starchitect Renzo Piano,who also designed the New York Times headquarters in New York and the newer buildings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

That's Ontani in the shimmery pale blue silk
 suit and pony tail.  We caught a glimpse of
him touring his own exhibition
while we were doing so as well.

This summer the Accademia's primary installation is of works by an Italian sculptor and painter of whom we hadn't heard - Luigi Ontani. We found his capricious sculptures technically superb as well as fun and a bit bizarre. The exhibit is open until September 22 of this year. The building also houses a permanent exhibition of works donated by some of the famous members of the Academy, including Bernini.

Ontani's version of the lupa, Rome's she-wolf, with himself as the wolf.

Part of an Ontani sculpture channeling
Gertrude Stein.

Okay, advice on the Trevi Fountain.  Try to go very early in the morning or late at night.  Otherwise, it's a mob scene.  Don't try to wade in the fountain ala Anita Eckberg in La Dolce Vita.   There are police patrolling and pushing tourists to obey an unwritten code of conduct.  Eating lunch isn't in the code (see below).  Nor, for some of the fountain police, is sitting on the edge of the fountain. 

Trevi Fountain code police:
The couple is being told to put their food away.

Last photo - Curator and professor (Temple University, Rome) Shara Wasserman --she with the gold purse -- takes a group to the exhibition space in Accademia di San Luca.

Dianne

McKim, Mead and White in Rome

Rome the Second Time is proud to present its 400th post.  We are grateful to our readers for their appreciation of our content and tolerance of our eccentricities. 

There is only one monument in Rome to McKim, Mead and White, the New York City-based firm that dominated American architecture in the half century after 1880--some 1,000 commissions, dozens of reknowned buildings.  It is the building housing the American Academy in Rome, still there and still operating more than one hundred years after its completion in 1913/14.  It is a gracious structure, superb in its balance and proportion, restrained in its ornamentation, representing the genteel tradition in architecture as fully as Henry James did for the novel. [As an update, we note an exhibition on the design and construction of the AAR building - a merely okay not a must-see exhibition -  is at the Academy, open 4 to 7 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through June 29, 2014.]

McKim's NYS pavilion, 1893,
modeling the Villa Medici

Indeed, the firm's link to the American Academy goes beyond the structure.  Although most of his knowledge of continental architecture was from books, and he did not see Rome until 1885, Charles Follen McKim was enamoured of European architecture.  Though he favored Italian over French design, McKim valued the French system of architectural training, and he would have been pleased to have studied Rome's architectural heritage at the French Academy, housed in the the Villa Medici--had he been a citizen.  Convinced that travel to Europe and physical immersion in its architectural splendors was essential to becoming an architect, McKim joined with another distinguished architect in the genteel tradition, Daniel Burnham, to found a post-graduate facility for architects in Rome--what became the American Academy.  The two solicited contributions from friends and fellow architects and brought the first class to Rome in 1895, where they were housed in temporary quarters.  The first painters and sculptors arrived in 1897. 

Stanford White's Washington Square arch

Rome was influential in some of the firm's most important works.  The Washington Memorial Arch, the signature of Washington Square, was designed by the flamboyant Stanford White, who based its shape on encyclopedic knowledge of the precise dimensions of dozens of Roman and Roman imperial arches.  McKim based his design for the New York State pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (above left) on the Villa Medici, and, according to one architectural historian, used his knowledge of the upper stage of the nymphaeum of the Villa Giulia (mid-16th century) to compose the facade of the Morgan Library in New York City.  Facade inscriptions on McKim's University Club in New York City, though critically received by its members, were incorporated into the final design when McKim explained that inscriptions were common to a variety of Rome structures, including Palazzo Spada, Porta Maggiore and Porta del Popolo, and the Acqua Paola fountain. 

To catch a glimpse of the most famous McKim, Mead and White building inspired by Rome, you'll have to go to New Jersey and dig around in its swamps and marshes.  "Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard," wrote Ada Louise Huxtable, architectural critic of the New York Times, "are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man."  She was referring to the Pennsylvania Station, arguably the most glorious and surely the most famous of the many structures designed by the firm, torn down between 1963 and 1965 (to make way for a skyscraper and a new Madison Square Garden), in what Lewis Mumford called "an irresponsible act of public vandalism." 

Construction of the Pennsylvania Station began in 1904 and was completed in 1910, in the midst of the presidency of William Howard Taft.  The design was McKim's, as was the decision to exclude a high-rise hotel desired by the railroad--a decision, according to historian Leland M. Roth, that doomed the building to its Secaucus fate.  It was enormous in every sense: 430 X 780 feet, two whole city blocks, sitting on 650 steel columns and, because of the unusual terrain, the trains were out of the way, 45 feet below street level.

Pennsylvania Station waiting room

It is well known that McKim's design--apparently worked out with Alexander Cassatt, brother of the painter, Mary Cassatt--was profoundly influenced by the monumentality and grandeur of the Baths of Caracalla (212-216 AD).  McKim had hired people to amble through the Baths so he could get a sense of scale and of human movement through its large spaces. 

A reconstruction of the Baths of Caracalla

Though the Station was bigger than the Baths--the general waiting room was some 20% larger--it was proportional to the ancient structure, and the waiting room of the Station was modeled on the Baths' tepidarium, or warm room (right and end of post).   Unlike the Baths, the vaults of McKim's Station were not structural; they only defined the space.  The Corinthian columns were sheathed in travertine from near Tivoli. 

Pennsylvania Station concourse

The Concourse--where travelers descended to the trains--was an airy delight, "one of the marvels of early twentieth-century engineering," according to Roth, and reminiscent of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's 18th-century etchings of imaginary prisons, according to architectural critic Martin Filler.  Outside, McKim's colonnade took inspiration from the Bank of England and Bernini's Piazza di San Pietro. 

Pennsylvania Station, colonnade

The Pennsylvania Station was much admired for many years, and its neo-classical monumentality remained a popular form on Washington's mall and in the late-1930s suburb of EUR, where Mussolini's Fascist regime adapted the style to modernism.   As the years went by, and enthusiasm for modernism--and modernist forms of the monumental, like the Empire State Building, or the glass box housing the United Nations--grew, the Station fell out of favor.  It was allowed to accumulate an unsightly layer of dirt and grime, and by the early 1960s, before there was much interest in conserving important old buildings, its defenders were too few to make a difference.  Frank Lloyd Wright's massive Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo came to a similar end in 1950.  And today, to experience what McKim had in mind, you'll have to buy a ticket to the Baths of Caracalla, or head for the wetlands of New Jersey, trowel in hand.

Bill

Design for a proposed reconstruction of the Tepidarium, Baths of Caracalla, 1889