EVIDENCE of the classical world is omnipresent in the hinterland of Rome. Ancient and modern coexist. But the tourist who arrives at the Aeroporto Leonardo da Vinci at Fiumicino, or has to kill time there, may not be aware that it is only a few miles away from the former port of Ostia, through which so much of Rome’s human and commercial traffic passed. The site, by a bend of the Tiber, was well chosen. A fortress was constructed in about 338 BC, and the town grew steadily in importance, with no fewer than 100,000 inhabitants in its heyday. Silting of the Tiber led to the creation of a large artificial harbour under the Emperor Claudius, which was supplemented by a smaller one in the reign of Trajan. The centre of the city was substantially redeveloped under Domitian and in the second century AD. Decline set in during the following century, when much of Ostia’s trade passed to Portus, on the right bank of the Tiber, and accelerated with the relative eclipse of Rome in the fourth century. That Saint Monica, mother of Saint Augustine, died there when the port was blockaded in 387 was a portent of what was to follow. The site was abandoned and the episcopal see transferred to Velletri; in 830 Pope Gregory IV founded his small town of Gregoriopoli half a kilometre to the east. Here, in 1483–6, the Florentine architect Baccio Pontelli built a state of the art fortress for Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, the future Pope Julius II.
Portico of the Piazzale of the Corporations: a ship, mosaic.
Much of the town wall can still be traced. From the Porta Romana, the decumanus maximus runs to the south-west. This is flanked by the remains of the obligatory public buildings – no fewer than eighteen temples and sanctuaries, public baths, a palaestra and barracks – as well as numerous residential areas. The masonry is largely of brick, and it is the ensemble rather than the calibre of any individual building (with the exception of the Hadrianic Capitolium) that impresses. The shadows cast by the pines ensure that even in the heat of the summer it is a pleasure to walk and search out the grisaille mosaics that make the Roman world seem surprisingly close. One in the Baths of Neptune shows the winds of the provinces with which most trade was conducted: Sicily, Egypt represented by a crocodile, Africa with an elephant, and Spain. Others, in the portico surrounding the so-called Piazzale delle Corporazioni, illustrate aspects of Ostia’s trade. Looking down on a mosaic of a ship under sail, we are left in no doubt of Ostia’s vital importance to the economy of imperial Rome. It was through Ostia that the city received her tribute of oil from Africa and the grain of Sicily and Egypt on which her population depended. Where better to escape when stranded for a few hours at the airport?
