March's Monthly Postcard from Rome (and Tuscia)
Over the last week I was showing a charming band of folk around Tuscia, our exploring interspersed with talks with lots of pictures, for Learn Italy. Etruscans a go-go; barmily fantastical Renaissance delights; a glorious fish lunch on the beach; a suitably medieval supper by a vast ancient open fire; medieval towers and Romanesque churches; volcanic lakes and hot springs; and of course some really fabulous floors.
We also had almost every single site entirely to ourselves as spring tentatively pushed through after a very damp winter: afternoons suddenly longer; flowers in bloom; the air redolent with instinctive, atavistic, optimism. I always think spring is the reminder that we are, after all, simple and visceral creatures!
The trip was all boundlessly evocative, exactly as I had hoped, and when I came back to Rome I rewatched La Chimera which I first saw at the cinema at the end of 2023 and which for those in Italy is presently available to stream on Raiplay. It’s about loss and love and Etruscan tomb robbing in the scrappy reaches of northern Lazio and southern Tuscany in the early eighties; what’s not to adore about all that?
As our trip drew to a close and our driver Umberto drove us all to Fiumicino Airport I thought one last flourish was in order and so we made a foray to the Museum of the Roman Ships on the airport approach road.
In nineteen fifty-seven work began on the building of the new airport at Fiumicino, the following year the first remains of ships preserved in the mud of a long-since retreated coastline began to come to light. Those remains are housed in a small museum (I’m a big fan of a small museum) which reopened in 2021 after twenty years and is home to one of the most important collections of ancient ships in the Mediterranean.
The museum sits in what was once the basin of Portus, the port first built during the reign of Claudius in the mid first century to address the ever greater threat of the silting up of the ancient port at Ostia, at the nearby mouth of the Tiber at a time of rapidly increasing traffic. It was here that the ships were found, abandoned in a sort of boat cemetery for vessels past their best, along the northernmost jetty of Claudius’ port (to the right of the picture).
The best preserved are naves cauducarie boats: wide flat-bottomed barges used for river transportation from Portus to the river port in Rome at Testaccio. When travelling from Rome to Portus they took advantage of the current, going the other way they were dragged from tow paths by beasts of burden and enslaved men along one of at least two artificially created canals which connected Portus to the Tiber before continuing upriver to Rome.
Grain, olive oil, wine, columns, and wild animals for the games at the amphitheatre were once transported along the river. These barges were absolutely fundamental to the growth of Rome, and to its celebrated grand buildings and dramatic spectacles. We had spent the week thinking of Phoenicians sailing to the Etrurian coast to dedicate a temple at Pyrgi in a spirit of alliance; imported Greek vases for the afterlife; Byzantine painters of medieval churches; and stonemasons reworking stone once imported from Egypt and Asia Minor as imperial bling, so it was nicely fitting to conclude a jaunt which some actual, tangible boats to remind us of the relentless movement across the Mediterranean since time immemorial. And where better to contemplate such things than an airport?
Saluti from Roma!
All best, Agnes
Your readers in the US can watch the wonderful La Chimera on Hulu.
This museum looks fascinating!! Had never heard of it. Thanks so much for pointing it out!!