Some of my favourite views of Rome

10: via della Madonna dei Monti

I prefer Prochyta’s isle to the noisy Subura.

After all, is there anywhere that’s so wretched and lonely

You wouldn’t rather be there than in constant danger of fire,

Of collapsing buildings, and all of the thousand perils

Of barbarous Rome, with poets reciting all during August!

Thus spoke Juvenal in his third Satire, with disdain, of the ancient subura. He lived in the (then) down-at-heel neighbourhood hard up against the hefty tuff wall which protected the Imperial and Roman Fora from the spread of fire in the Roman slum. He had come to Rome from the verdant hills of what we now call Ciociaria south of the city and lived in a garret in the subura.

Apartment buildings towered up to eight storeys high, rising above the squelching filth of a valley which was never quite dry. The Argiletum was the road which ran through the subura, linking it to the Roman Forum. Then the busiest place in the world, the Forum was the hub of civic activity: politics and law; triumph, religion, and public-speaking. But it was also a space where the average Roman bloke, who had neither much to do nor indeed anywhere much to do it, would hang around sitting on the steps of grand public buildings passing the time before being flung a coin in return for running an errand.

We can, then, imagine the Argiletum, of which the section closest to the Forum corresponds to the via della Madonna dei Monti, as a bustling and chaotic street. We can imagine it full of the grotty and perilous apartment buildings owned by greedy and dodgy landlords described so evocatively by Juvenal:

We inhabit a Rome held up for the most part by slender

Props; since that’s the way management stop the buildings

Falling down; once they’ve covered some ancient yawning

Crack, they’ll tell us to sleep soundly at the edge of ruin.

The place to live is far from all these fires, and all these

Panics in the night. Ucalegon is already summoning a hose,

Moving his things, and your third floor’s already smoking:

You’re unaware; since if the alarm was raised downstairs,

The last to burn will be the one a bare tile protects from

The rain, up there where gentle doves coo over their eggs.