Extension of Rome's "C" line: Change, Disruption, and Ugliness

We lived just off Via Gallia about 5 years ago, and while there we became familiar with ongoing construction of the new "C" line of Rome's Metro system. The work currently being done will extend the C line from the existing San Giovanni Metro stop, near the basilica San Giovanni in Laterano, to the Coliseum. The new line will be beneath an area bounded on one side by the Servian wall, and on the other by via Sannio (and its street-side market) and, further down, by apartment buildings. 

It's no doubt worth doing, but as the work goes on, the impact on the immediate neighborhood is enormous. 

Progress has been made at the eastern end of the project--enough so that a nice, popular park has been carved out above the new line.  That's the Servian wall, with San Giovanni in Laterano in the distance. 

At the end of the park is one of the entrances to the soon-to-be modernized market. 

Shabby in its way, the un-modernized market is also mysterious, captivating, and souk-like.  Plans to redo the space, to make it more orderly and geometric, and less vulnerable to the elements, are posted in the market. 

The market as it is 

A rendering of the new market 

Further to the west, more or less paralleling via Amba Aradam as it works its way downhill toward Porta Metronia, the neighborhood is captive to massive red and yellow construction barriers, which were, of course, immediately covered with graffiti. Some of these barriers are within 10 or 12 feet of apartment buildings--and have been for years. 

Construction barrier at right, graffiti everywhere

Dianne, in still another place where Bill has dragged her.

The Servian wall, of ancient vintage, runs nearby, and parts of it have been braced with metal stanchions to prevent collapse, as construction shakes and rattles existing structures. 

Porta Metronia, left. At upper right, note braces to keep the Servian wall from falling down

A tennis club still exists in the path of the subway, but one imagines that will succumb as more "progress" is made. 

Tennis club. Survival in doubt.

A lovely view. Wine on the balcony?

Bill 

Metro C: A Great Idea with Human Costs

Rome desperately needs more underground transportation, and the city is making an effort to provide it.  The current project is Metro C, designed to connect Rome's eastern suburbs with the central city, and to connect stations along its 18 km route to existing lines A and B.  Stations on the eastern part of the C line have been completed and are operational; we've walked that route and shown our readers some of the new stations and neighborhoods they serve.

The inner-city section, where the all-important connections with other lines will be made, is under construction.  When completed, there will be a new Amba Aradam station at Porta Metronia, serving a large and heavily populated neighborhood (one of our favorite places to live) to the south and east of the Coliseum, with completion to the Colosseo station and Metro B.  The C line will also connect with Metro A at San Giovanni.  The completion date for these connections is 2022.  And there may be a station under Piazza Venezia, if it proves possible to do the work without destruction of too much Roman heritage.

The plan sketched above seems reasonable, and we're looking forward to riding the fully-automated line, assuming we live that long.  In the meantime, those who live near or adjacent to the construction route face years of irritation and disruption: noise, of course, and traffic problems caused by re-routing, but more important, hundreds of yards of tall metal Metro fencing, sometimes within a few feet of apartment buildings that not so long ago were adjacent to small parks, a tennis club, a soccer field, and a portion of a Roman wall.  In short, Metro C has its human costs.  That said, when the work is completed, residents of adjacent areas will have some of the best Metro connections in the city.

A few months ago we toured the construction zone near Porta Metronia. The tour begins at the porta and runs southeast down via Ipponio, turns left at a nameless, curving street just beyond via dei Laterani, and left again on via della Ferratella in Laterano.  Here we go.
Bill

From Porta Metronia

Down via Ipponio.  A tennis club at left escaped the construction--for now.

Inside the yellow walls

Yellow walls outside your door.  Trees inside and outside the construction zone.

Turn left here for the hospital and the church. Sure. 

Looking back.  Pedestrian crossing.

This one's particularly depressing.  

This used to be a nice street to walk on, to a supermarket.  

Eugene Debs, the American socialist labor leader?

Headed back toward Porta Metronia.  The sign says the parking spaces are reserved for motorcyles (and scooters, no doubt). Romans are adept at marking things off with tape. 

There's a Roman wall on the other side of the yellow wall.  

One of the pleasures of a walk like this is reading the posters.  This one says Dino, hands in the air, was shot and killed by
a police officer.  

A small park, largely intact despite the construction, close to Porta Metronia, where we began.

Walking the (Aurelian) Wall II: Porta Metronia to Porta San Paolo

"City walls, to a properly constituted American, can never be an object of indifference; and it is emphatically 'no end of a sensation' to pace in the shadow of this massive cincture of Rome....even to idle eyes the prodigious, the continuous thing bristles with eloquent passages."  Henry James, 1873

The Aurelian Wall near Casa del Jazz.  Here, from the outside, a sloping giant, with doors and windows added
later, perhaps to serve "inside" residents

Thwarted. Inside of wall not accessible here

Each section of the 3rd-century Aurelian wall has its own pleasures and mysteries and delivers its own lessons.  RST blog readers may recall we are on a mission to walk the entire (once 19 km, or 12 mile) wall.  On this section, going (roughly) south and west from Porta Metronia, we discovered how much of the wall is inaccessible, especially from the inside. [Update:  a Google map includes this itinerary.]


That lesson was delivered immediately, when, exiting Porta Metronia, we found ourselves barred from the inside of the wall by a gate (and inside, a half dozen plastic dishes and cartons--someone is feeding the area's cats).

Seems like suburbia, except there's a wall

We returned to the outside, which here skirts one of Rome's newest and best kept urban parks: benches and fountains, joggers, walkers, thinkers.  How long, we wondered, could we sit on a park bench without a book, a newspaper, or a cell phone?

Old scaffolding inside the wall/no access

At Porta Latina, through which runs the ancient via Latina, we peek inside and hope for access, just a fence and yards of year-old scaffolding.  Outside, the wall is sometimes marred by a fence (presumably to protect passers-by from falling bricks) and marked by the Papal families who restored it at various times: here, the Barberini family, with their bees on the shield.

Remnant of an aqueduct

The next porta is a handsome one: Porta San Sebastiano, through which runs (well, not now, it's closed for repairs, to reopen in the next century), via Appia Antica.  Just inside (besides a guy taking a leak) is another arch, and a grand one.  Not part of the wall, it's one of few remnants of the Aquedotto Antoniniano, which once fed the baths of Caracalla.  On the porta itself, we found some chiseled crosses and the date 1622 - ancient graffiti?  This porta is the entrance to the one part of the wall where one can walk inside: the wall museum, an RST Top 40 site.

Maybe they own horses

The next opening in the wall is door-to-door automobiles, but it is, indeed, a porta: Porta Ardeatine.  EUR is a couple of miles to the left, connected by the multi-lane viale Cristoforo Colombo. The baths of Caracalla are a half mile downhill to the right.  We're still looking for access to the wall's inside, and we're still being denied: on this side, a fence guards a long, maintained field, someone's private estate we would guess, legal or "abusive" we can't say.

Homeless "shelter"/locked gate to inside of wall

And on the other side of viale Cristoforo Colombo, another locked gate, a cat, and a primitive plastic shelter used by the homeless.  On we go, still outside, past the Casa del Jazz (taken from the Mafia as part of a legal penalty, years ago).  The grounds on this section are better maintained, and the wall is designed differently, with wedge-shaped cutouts wedges at its top (see photo, top of this post).  We noticed several ground-level doors--certainly not part of the original defensive system, perhaps once used as exit/entrances by families living on the inside.

Florentine Pope advertising wall work

At a sharp right turn, more evidence of Papal interest, this time the Medici of Florence (all those fleurs-de-lys)  And further on, the brick façade removed to reveal the tufo--of different colors, perhaps different eras--beneath.

Stairway into upper San Saba

Finally, at the next porta, we can tuck ourselves inside.  Immediately, the wall shrinks--we're inside now, on higher ground.  As we follow the wall around the corner and down the hill, we enjoy peeks through the wall at soccer fields and, to our right, views of the little-known and curiously isolated community of San Saba, constructed in the early 20th century.

Porta San Paolo (and at left, the Piramid)

Ahead, the wall is simply gone, victim of Rome's automobiles, and then beyond, the magnificent Porta San Paolo, out of which runs via Ostiense (the road to Ostia); today this porta, too, houses a museum.  Historically, the piazza is well-known as the site of short-lived but furious resistance to the German occupation of the city in 1943.

Cafe' du Parc. Table service, but order inside.  

Even downhill, this wall-walking is hard work, and so we treat ourselves to a glass of wine at one of our favorite redoubts, the Café du Parc, with its long, now fenced-in outdoor space.  From our table, we enjoy a view of the Ostiense Post Office, one of four designed by noted architects during the Fascist era. This one--worth looking at from the front, and inside, too--is the work of Adalberto Libera and Mario De Renzi.  When it opened in 1935, Mussolini was there.

Bill

Inside the wall, San Saba just ahead; the wall seems short here, but it's because the ground is high.  The wall
is much higher on its "outside."

Walking the (Aurelian) Wall: Porta Metronia to Porta Maggiore

The Aurelian Wall, section east of Porta San Giovanni.  Garbage, mud, feral cats, broken fountains,
 dog walks, but still powerful.  Days after we were there, Il Messaggero reported that citizens of the
 neighborhood just to the left of this photo were upset over abusive (illegal)vendors selling stolen (and
 thrown away) goods on the sidewalk next to the park.  (Dianne:they should be upset about more than that.)

The American President Teddy Roosevelt is best known for charging up San Juan Hill with his Roughriders, but his taste for adventure could take other forms.  One of the things he liked to do with similarly inclined buddies was to set a compass direction from the White House and follow it as closely as possible, through back yards and alleys, industrial sites and cemeteries, wherever it led.  By leaving the well-traveled streets and sidewalks behind, Roosevelt hoped to experience the nation's capitol in a fresh way.

Only Presidents can do that sort of thing without being shot, and even a man as resourceful and determined as Teddy would have trouble applying the idea in Rome, where enormous apartment blocks--not to mention uncooperative portieri (doormen)--would present insuperable obstacles.

Yet in the spirit of Roosevelt (and his successors, the Guy Debord-led Situationists of the postwar era, with their concept of the dérive), we took a stab at rearranging the city--at seeing it in a new way--by setting a goal of walking the entire Aurelian Wall, starting with a reasonable portion, of course.

The Aurelian Wall was built in 271-75 AD, replacing the earlier, smaller Servian Wall, of which just a few pieces remain.  The Aurelian Wall, in contrast, remains intact in large stretches, perhaps covering as much as half of its original 19 km (12 mile) length.  It was built quickly in response to a 270 AD barbarian invasion, in part by incorporating existing structures, like the Pyramid.  Some scholars estimate as much as 1/6 of the wall was existing structures (spoiler alert - we found some on this walk!).  Popes and others rebuilt and refashioned the wall over the years.  But it remains an impressive artifact of ancient and Renaissance history, and a constant part of one's life in today's Rome. [Update: a Google map includes this itinerary.]

Porta Metronia

Just as the wall cuts through Rome in some curious ways--you can't follow the wall in an automobile or a scooter (though Nanni Moretti tried for a bit in his film, Caro Diario), or even, now and then, on foot--so did we find ourselves moving through the Eternal City in new and unexpected ways, through parks we had never been in before, on streets we had never traveled, amid Romans ruins we didn't know existed.  Here's a brief account of our first adventure in "walking the wall."

We began our journey at Porta Metronia (in our neighborhood), walking counterclockwise inside the wall.  Here one can see how this portion of the fortification was constructed--its stairways and passageways--as well as how it's used today, by birds that nest comfortably in holes once meant for drainage and observation of the enemy.  There's a piece of graffiti here, too--a reddish piece featuring an animal resembling Fritz the Cat--but it's on a piece of the wall coated with an unusual flat surface; the wall itself, we noticed on our trek, is essentially untouched by the city's street artists. 

Birds in the wall

Construction of Metro Line C obscures the wall for a few hundreds meters, though one can see it through small holes in the construction fences and, here and there, as a truck or bulldozer exits or enters the construction site.  As the wall approaches the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, it appears to be only a few feet high, and, indeed, from the inside (only) it is, because the church--and the wall--are located high on a hill.  We discovered many portions of the wall were constructed so that the wall was high from the outside, but supported by hills and earth on the inside, appearing much shorter from that perspective.

The wall--low here on top of a hill--appears between
the orange fence and the truck

wedding photo

On the grounds of the basilica, we observed a couple being photographed after their wedding.  We entered the basilica from the side and back and walked out the front. 

A gathering.  Roma? 

Beyond the basilica, the wall took us by the site of what appeared to be large gathering of Roma (and to our left, the tacky vendor tents in front of Borromini's church), then along the impressive and complex grounds of Porta San Giovanni, now, unfortunately, closed to the public.

Dry fountain

Crossing via Appia Nuova, we found ourselves in a long and narrow park, with 2 dog walks, feral black cats, mounds of garbage, and dry (20th-century) fountains in which water once flowed down toward the wall.  Once upon a time there was vision here, but no more.

Kounellis art-gate

Ahead, the wall seemed to curve rather oddly to the right and end at the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.  There, in the piazza that fronts the church, was an unexpected treat: an enormous art nouveau-style decorative (yet functional) gate, created by Rome-based artist Jannis Kounellis in 2007 and featuring dozens of  suspended ball-like objects of colored glass.

Ruins of the Circo Variano, then the wall

But where's the wall?  To the left of the church we headed inward, past a gate (there is public access here, though the entrance is somewhat intimidating), and ahead an historical marker, in Italian.  Looking past the marker, and past some archaeological digs (more on them in a moment) is the wall and, behind it (across a street, as it turns out), offices of the Italian daily newspaper, Il Messaggero.

The guys who set us straight

We turned left at the marker, then right under the arcade of the Museum of Musical Instruments, speculating as we went that the wall-like structure across the field to our left was an aqueduct.  Ahead, at the juncture of the "L" made by two long buildings, we were again considering what it was we were observing when we encountered two men, one carrying schematic drawings of the area.

Wall turns sharply left.  Filled-in arches suggest it was (also) an
aqueduct, another use of existing structures to create the wall.

Responding to our questions, he pulled out a clean sheet of paper, hastily drew his own general diagram of the area, and explained that the wall we had thought was an aqueduct was, indeed, the Aurelian wall (from the end of the 2nd building, just past what he called the "baretta" [cute little bar], one can see it make a sharp left turn, though one cannot get closer here).  And, he continued, the new arcaded buildings, much of the grounds of which we could see, and the terra on which we were standing were all part of the Circo Variano, a huge entertainment complex built by Severian emperors in the first few decades of the 3rd century AD and as yet barely touched by archaeologists. As the man told us, they can't get at the ruins because they now lie under many city buildings.

The relevant spaces are in the left third of this aerial view.
At lower left, the dotted-line oval is the anfiteatro (Amphitheater
 Castrense), with the Aurelian wall going off to the right and up.
  Above the open field at left/center is the Aurelian wall, having
 turned left. The long white markings demark the Circo Variano.

Porta Maggiore: two aqueducts--Aqua Claudia, on top of
 Annio Novus--on high.  Later became part of the Aurelian Wall

Back in the church "piazza," we turned right to locate the wall as it emerged from the complex of buildings.  We walked past a museum honoring the Sardinian military (closed for renovations), past a monumental turn-of-the-20th century building that now houses administrative offices for Acea, the electrical utility.  And there was the wall, jutting into Piazza Maggiore and meeting there an enormous aqueduct, two water chambers on its top.



Here we turned back, now on the outside of the wall, underneath the Tangenziale (elevated highway) and made an immediate right down the left side of viale Castrense.  Across the street was the wall, curved here to incorporate and accommodate the Anfiteatro (amphiteater) Castrense, its Corinthian columns now embedded in the wall.  We had been by here dozens of times and never noticed the curve of the wall or the columns, nor considered that they might be the ruins of an ancient structure.  The amphitheater is one of the "existing" structures that was incorporated into the Aurelian Wall to hasten its construction.

The surprise of the day; Rome's second coliseum:  Anfiteatro Castrense; the arches
 were filled in about 50 years after it was built,when the wall was constructed.

Those 3rd century AD columns are still there.

Now following the outside of the wall, we crossed the street at the arches and hugged the sidewalk to the left.  Ahead, back at Porta San Giovanni, we headed up via Appia Nuova, toward home.

Bill