A Wander through Ostia Antica, part 1
From the via Ostiense to the Theatre
Ostia Antica, once the ancient port of Rome and now a couple of kilometres inland, is one of my very favourite places to take people outside the city centre. It is vast, quiet, unrelentingly beautiful and interesting, and easy to get to on public transport (just a twenty-five minute local train ride from Porta San Paolo followed by a ten minute walk).
Once a bustling port, an important city in its own right, and the engine room of the caput mundi it is positively dripping with atmosphere. The site is imbued with the kind of evocative slight melancholy which I adore and which, in late spring when I took most of these photos, is exquisitely expressed in the most tenacious of the poppies, swaying dustily in the welcome hint of a breeze coming from the coast.
The history of Ostia is almost as old as that of Rome. According to Livy, himself relying on earlier sources, it was founded in the seventh century BCE by Ancus Martius, the fourth of Rome’s seven semi-legendary kings. The port grew up in proximity to the nearby salt marshes which provided the foundation of Rome, once again legend and practicality converge. Emerging from legend it was Rome’s first colony, and was founded as a castrum, a military base.
As Rome’s sphere of influence grew during the Republic so too did the port of Ostia. By the reign of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor ruling at the time of the birth of Christ, Rome was a city of perhaps a million people. At the same time Ostia was a city of around fifty thousand. During the apogee of empire under Trajan and Hadrian in the early second century, Ostia’s population may have reached a hundred thousand: as Rome grew so did its port. To put that into perspective, though estimates vary, when Pompeii was destroyed by Vesuvius it was a city of somewhere around twelve to fifteen thousand residents.
One can easily spend a whole day at Ostia Antica, but a couple of hours also make for a thoroughly rewarding visit. Just bear in mind it’s closed on Mondays. When visiting with folk I very rarely follow the same route twice, but here’s part one of a loose suggested itinerary I’ve developed over the years which offers a good overview of the site which, if stamina and time allow, can easily be extended in further exploration out to the Porta Marina, once the city gate out onto the coast (though where the waves once lapped now runs an unlovely major road, via Guido Calza, named for the director of the archeological investigations undertaken during the Fascist period). There are also a café and loos just beyond the theatre, always useful things to know!
Today we enter the site on the lavic paving of the via Ostiense, now treacherously uneven but once painstakingly maintained: after all Roman soldiers with twisted ankles were no use to anyone. The via Ostiense was the road to Ostia which still leads out of Rome, though the urban section is now long since buried beneath a grubby tangle of concrete. The modern via Ostiense begins opposite the Porta San Paolo station from where the train to Ostia starts. The road was one link to the city of Rome, ideal for marching soldiers, but the traffic of goods from the sea port was by river.
The name of the once great port comes from the Latin ostium meaning mouth, for its position at what was once the opening of the Tiber. In fact today the coastline has retreated significantly, the product of both natural and man-made phenomena. The port also ran along the river, once lined with warehouses in and out of which stevedores once lugged goods imported from across the Mediterranean: grain and olive oil; wine and garum; coloured marbles and exotic beasts destined for the games at the Colosseum.
It is, as ever, worth bearing in mind that a significant amount of the trade which passed through Ostia, as elsewhere across the Empire, was human. Rome was built on slavery. Slave traders trafficked men, women, and children from all parts of the Empire; fodder for the insatiable maw of Rome.
The Necropolis
A visit to Ostia Antica begins outside city on the way to or from Rome. Outside the city of the living is where the necropoli are found. While in Rome, for the most part, those tombs which survive do so because they were big enough to be useful for fortifications (like the Pyramid of Cestius at Testaccio) those at Ostia, like the buildings of the city itself, survived precisely because of their ordinariness: they didn’t have valuable materials to loot, and the abandonment of the area meant that the brick and tufa wasn’t cleared away to be built on top of.
It is thus perhaps unsurprising that the best preserved tombs are not those which line the via Ostiense, which was prime real estate for the afterlife clad in decorations ripe for the picking, but the less grand tombs on the secondary back roads.
When we reach the city limits at what remains of the Porta Romana we enter the city of the living, to our right we have to imagine the river dense with barges being loaded and unloaded into the warehouse buildings, as per this relief now in the Vatican Museums.
Here I like to cross the Decumanus, the main drag of the ancient city, leaving the bumpy lava behind and instead taking the modern asphalted road which runs alongside where the river once flowed.
As one reaches the road, mosaics of the bath complex of the Cisarii are visible (even in the winter months when many of the mosaics at Ostia are covered to protect against frost these usually remain visible). The Cisarii were cab drivers, who would ferry merchants from the Porta Marina at what was once the coast into Ostia proper, perhaps to inspect their warehouses, or to their lodgings at the port. The charmingly literal black and white mosaics show suitably marine themes—swimmers and sea creatures—as well as images of the carriages pulled by mules driven by the men who once sweated and gossiped and grumbled in these rooms.
The Ancient Route of the River
As we follow the asphalt road we are walking alongside what were once warehouses, now reduced to rubble below undulating greenery. Shady trees today stand where once stevedores unloaded and reloaded river barges with amphorae filled with grain, oil and wine; columns and statues of exotic marbles, crates of lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) in a sweaty, smelly, jostling cacophony; a concentration of the cross-pollination of Empire. Accents from Britannia and Bythnia, Athens and Arles; merchants and slaves, customs officers and soldiers.
The “Piazza of the Corporations” and the Theatre
I like to take this stretch of asphalted road for various reasons: it gives a sense of the river; it is quite simply a much easier surface to walk on, saving energy for more intrepid exploring further in; and also because it catapults the visitor directly into the area which the Fascist-era excavations called the Piazza delle Corporazioni, a name which reflects the concentration of business activity which went on here.
In the centre of the once colonnaded and paved “piazza” are the remains of the base of a temple, probably dedicated to Ceres (from which “cereal”) the goddess of the harvest associated particularly with grain. There are many mosaic depictions of the implement below, a sort of winnowing basket for the separation of the wheat from the chaff, replete with ears of corn.
This emphasis on grain is a logical choice: imports which came to Rome through Ostia were fundamental to the feeding of the caput mundi. Grain, first from Sicily and then—from the reign of Augustus onwards—augmented by vast quantities also from the valley of the Nile, was the staple of Rome. All the other exotic and extravagant imports were icing on the elaborate imperial cake. If Rome’s panem came through Ostia so too did the supplies for its circenses.
The imports of both bread and of circuses are reflected in the mosaics of the offices of the prosperous merchants and shipbrokers who had offices at Ostia: animals and enslaved fighters—including gladiators—for the various games. Above a bull and his adversary, below elephants designed by artists who had, we can assume, probably seen one in person.
Above, the shipbrokers of Cagliari, ancient Karalis, set out their stall. It is all redolent of a panoply of foaming wakes criss-crossing the Mediterranean.
At one end of the hub of Ostia’s business activity is its theatre, the port city’s central space for public entertainments. Built only during the reign of Augustus on the cusp of our Common Era it could first house perhaps two and a half thousand spectators, a number which increased to four thousand or so in the late second century when the building was extended, indicative of the population boom of Rome and, by consequence, Ostia.
The theatre as we see it today is quite significantly the product of a Fascist-era restoration and reconstruction. Heavily reworked or not it is, nevertheless, an extremely evocative space and is regularly used for summer concerts which is extremely pleasing in its anthropological coherence. Last September I saw Patti Smith in concert where once the bawdy comedies of Terence played to raucous laughter which if one is feeling whimsical one can imagine still echoing from the marble.
Next time I shall continue this wander to look at some of my favourite Ostian residential buildings both grand and lowly, an ancient gastropub, and some impressive heating technology at the fanciest public bath complex.
Thank you for this history. Is it reasonable to spend a few hours there in late July? We will be staying nearby for one night before our tour to Tuscany but I am concerned about the heat and the jet lag.
So many happy memories of a delightful jaunt