All Entries in the "Rome" Category

The hidden city: underground Rome

A wall painting in the Case Romane del Celio, one of the rare underground sites open to the public, in the Clivo Scauri beneath SS Giovanni e Paolo.

Some questions never go away. One I get constantly is, ‘Why did you choose to set your books in Rome?’ The honest answer is I didn’t; Rome chose me, clubbing me over the head one day when I happened to be there editing a book about somewhere else entirely. I’ve now completed seven Costa novels, and still have two more to go under my present contract… and hopefully lots after that.

So am I bored with Rome? You have to be kidding. Rome isn’t a place, it’s an entire universe, a limitless world of possibilities, ancient, medieval and modern. The Romans have a saying about their city: ‘Non basta una vita’. One life isn’t enough. You bet. Take, for example, the background to The Seventh Sacrament, which is a city I never knew existed until I took to the streets and started asking interesting questions of interesting people.

Much of this book takes place in underground Rome. No, not the odd sewer or archaeological excavation. I mean a different, hidden city altogether, a world of temples and streets, shops and simple homes, all going back two thousands years or more, and very familiar indeed to the specialists who spend their time exploring this unseen metropolis.

Ancient Rome was huge, a city of more than a million souls, and its subterranean legacy falls into three distinct types. Over two millennia the Imperial-era city has come to be buried by the rebuilding work of the centuries. Palaces such as Nero’s Domus Aurea - the Golden House - now lie beneath the rubble of ages, in the case of the Domus beneath the hill by the side of the Colosseum, next to the modern subway station. Many churches stand on the actual sites of the homes of Christian martyrs, which are preserved in the foundation.

But two kinds of remains were put beneath the earth to begin with. The first are the ancient sewers and aqueducts built out of pride and civic duty by emperors competing with one another for their legacy. Many are still working today. The Trevi fountain is fed by an Imperial aqueduct. The Cloaca Maxima, the original sewer of pre-Imperial Rome, which runs through the Forum, continues to empty into the Tiber as it did in the days when the bodies of executed criminals were thrown into it for quick disposal.

Walk along the Tiber and you will see many ancient outlets such as this - now used by the city homeless

And there are the temples, which came to form the heart of my story. SACRAMENT centres around Giorgio Bramante, an archaeologist with an obsession for the subterranean, and one element of it in particular: Mithraic temples which were usually built beneath the earth to begin with. Bramante is an expert - as much as one can be - on the cult of Mithras which was wiped out when the empire adopted Christianity as Rome’s sole religion when Constantine won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. The literature and rites of Mithraism were largely lost after that time. But we know that the cult was popular among soldiers and civil servants, that it emphasised loyalty to the state and the empire, and that its followed were divided into seven different hierarchical ranks, with promotion depending upon some kind of sacrament, a penance, perhaps an ordeal, which had to be borne in order to gain advancement. Hence the title of my book.

You can read a lot about Mithraism these days - much of it conjecture. But I don’t research books by reading alone. I needed to know what it felt like to be underground, and to talk to people who shared the same kind of interests I intended to visit upon Giorgio Bramante.

The enterprising tourist can find several interesting underground sites open to the public. The catacombs are well known - and pretty boring to me. The Basilica of San Clemente, close to the Colosseum, is altogether more interesting. Pay a small fee and you can descend into its lower levels, passing through an early Christian church, and winding up in the original subterranean Mithraeum. Just around the corner, in the ancient street known today as the Clivo Scauri, there is also a recently-opened excavation beneath the church of SS Giovanni e Paolo which has revealed shops, homes and a wealth of wall paintings.

But Giorgio Bramante would have looked down on these as mere tourist attractions. I needed more… and I soon found the place to get it. Roma Sotterranea is an organisation run by people who have permission to go places the ordinary public can’t. They have an excellent web site. They run tours for the public. They also have a membership system that runs occasional visits to more out of the way sites too, some of which come close to what we in the UK would call pot holing and in the US spelunxing.

I signed up to join in the winter of 2004 and have fond if chilly memories of those months. To be honest, damp, dark underground spaces aren’t my favourite places. But I wanted to try to understand what drove people to investigate them, and, more than anything, to get some feel for what they were really like. I hope that informs the finished book, much of which takes place in the caves, waterways, and hidden temples and streets that run beneath modern Rome, unseen by the millions who tramp the pavement above.

And when I felt I had enough I stopped. I write fiction, not fact. I need a solid basis on which to weave my fantasies. But I am not writing a guide. Some of the places in SACRAMENT - such as the Little Museum of Purgatory and the ossuary of the Via Veneto - are real. Most are not, or are mangled versions of the original. That is what I do for a living: invent from a basis of truth.

It was a great experience. But when I look back on writing the next book I can see I didn’t spent one moment underground. Instead, that title focuses on the world and legacy of Caravaggio, a continuing obsession of my detective Nic Costa, and one I was happy to explore through a year spent largely in galleries, private, public and religious.

Non basta una vita. Dead right…

The church that Michelangelo built

Here’s a place I’ve never used in a book. I still can’t help drifting back there whenever I’m in Rome though.

Santa Maria degli Angeli (e dei Martiri, if we’re to give the place its full title) is nothing to look at from the outside, just a few hundred metres from the bustle of Termini station. But within, it’s truly remarkable, and has quite a story to tell.

The facade is, in fact, the former tepidarium or the Baths of Diocletian, a part ruin now one of the great Roman museums just around the corner. In the mid sixteenth century Michelangelo was commissioned to turn the wrecked tepidarium into a church.

What you see today isn’t quite what he envisaged. The interior was tarted up during the eighteenth century, painting over Michelangelo’s plain, vast interior with some rather ornate additions. But the size and space is still quite remarkable, a reminder of the grandeur of the original Roman building, something which Michelangelo was determined to preserve.

Certainly worth a visit, and there’s an intriguing meridian line built into the floor, on the orders of a pope who wanted to check the accuracy of the Gregorian calendar. It is accompanied by a sundial that ties into lots of fancy stuff about the solar noon, and a hole in the wall through which the sun shines at a certain point on the summer solstice. But that’s all getting a bit Dan Brown for me. I just love the place for its wonderful sense of peace and scale, in a bustling and largely unlovely part of Rome.

Inside the presidential palace

This is the front door to one of the most famous residential palaces in Rome. The Palazzo del Quirinale sits on top of the high hill overlooking the forum and Piazza Venezia. It is the official residence of the President of Italy. Most tourists are confined to the wonderful view of the city from the steps. What only a handful know is that you can get inside, and for free, if you know how.

It’s simple really. All you do is turn up on a Sunday morning after 8.30 and before 11 or so. There’s a simple security process (you won’t need ID) then you’re inside the interior seeing the rooms that are normally used to greet other heads of states. There are some block out dates which you will find on the President’s page here.

Now if only the French would follow suit. Through means which are, frankly devious, they have hung on to a much more magnificent pad, the Palazzo Farnese, above, in the square of the same name, next to the Campo dei Fiori. This is meant to be magnificent - if you can get in. After much pressure the French, who use this as their embassy (a legacy of Napoleon’s invasion of Italy) will let ordinary mortals through the door. But boy do they make it hard.

The page on how to visit on their website is extremely difficult to find. You can try to get it here. But you will need to make your request one to four months in advance, and preference will be given to ‘art historians’. And you get just 50 minutes on specific days of the year. A fine way to treat one of the cultural treasures of Rome….

To rub it in the French Embassy offers a ‘virtual tour’ here. I wonder if anyone in the building has noticed it doesn’t work?

The art of Roman bread

Panella is a bit snooty. The place describes itself as ‘L’Arte del Pane’, the Art of Bread. I got a very Roman matronly wag of the finger for daring to take a picture - without flash I might add - inside the shop. But I suppose if you’re this good at your job….

Panella makes bread of all kinds - from flour and potatoes and chestnut. And all shapes… animals, famous buildings, reptiles….

And pastries and chocolate things and fruit cakes and… well, that’s enough. Suffice to say that on a Sunday morning when every Roman lady is filled with a hormonal need to buy cake this place is like Harrods during a sale. Not cheap, but pretty much unique. You’ll find it in the Via Merulana, the long busy road that leads from Santa Mario Maggiore to San Giovanni in Laterano. It’s next to the auditorium of Maecenas which is at the head of the Via Mecenate if you want to locate this on a map (Via Merulana 54-55 to be precise). The restaurant next doors, the name of which I forgot, used to be pretty good too, and the nearby Baia Chia in Via Machiavelli has a reputation for fish and Sardinian dishes.

Sacro e Profana, an unusual Roman restaurant

I hate recommending restaurants in Italy for two reasons: they change quickly, and my preference may not be yours. Two old favourites - the pizzeria Li Rioni near the Colosseum and Ditirambo in the Campo Dei Fiori - have been pretty poor of late and are definitely off my list.

But here’s a very unusual place that’s never let me down, and last night was on its customary sparkling form. Sacro e Profano is situated in the former church of San Giovanni del Maroniti in the narrow Via dei Maroniti, little more than an alley behind the Trevi Fountain. The interior is wonderful - joky ‘classical’ paintings of a heaven and hell theme on the walls, a few tables outside, a ground floor entirely devoted to cooking around a wood fired oven, then two floors for diners, the highest next to a fake organ, possibly where the real thing would have been.

The food is southern, with a lot of Pugliese and Calabrian influences. So the 15 euro starter (one is more than enough for two) has fresh swordfish and tuna dishes, and searing hot njuda (sausage cream) and peppery fish row among other items. The wood fired oven is used for pizzas which are among the best in Rome - and very economical at eight euros or so up. Get a table with a view of downstairs though and you get a free show too.

Here one lone chef does the front of house cooking. Some dishes, such as pasta, happen out back. But for the most part this solitary chap is busily cooking pizza, bread, vegetables and other dishes, while stoking up the fire with logs too.

I hope they pay the chap well. He was hard at work when we walked in at 8.30, and still at it when we left at close to eleven.

The food was the best found anywhere on this trip to Rome. Highly recommended: wild boar casserole with wild asparagus covered in gorgeous smoked scamorza cheese, one of the most expensive items on the menu at 17 euros.

The best busker in Rome?

My chapter in The Chopin Manuscript features a very talented busker outside the Pantheon in Rome. But Felicia Kaminski is an invention of my imagination. Among the frauds and the phoneys working the streets of Rome hunting tourist euros, there is true talent. Watch the very brief movie above for proof.

This was shot this morning in between showers outside Borromini’s beautiful church of Sant’Agnese in Agone. The busker concerned was playing everything from Bach to Vivaldi and Rimsky-Korsakov. And the amazing thing is he was playing it all on what appeared to be a bog standard street accordion, the kind where you can’t even see the keys or buttons while you’re playing. Here’s the fellow below with a young fan (sorry about the noise but this was shot on my pocket Panasonic FX-100 which is really a still camera). And if you want to see what the church looks like inside view the movie below

A few new places to eat in Rome

It’s easy to eat badly in Rome if you go to the places where the tourist crowds are predominant. But you can find some lovely small and friendly restaurants in the centre too. Here are three places to think about, all just a few minutes from the Piazza Navona.

La Danesina (via del Governo Vecchio, 125, open every day, tel 06 6868693) is a small restaurant with some outside tables along the narrow largely pedestrian street that runs towards the Tiber, in parallel with Vittorio Emmanuele. There are lots of restaurants and wine bars around here. Danesina is long-established and very reliable for good, authentic Roman food. It does fill up with locals at lunch times, so don’t get there much after one. The lunch time prices are simply amazing: a plate of chicory salad with anchovies, puntarelle, for three euros or so, followed by pasta for four or five euros or meat with vegetables for six. It’s a bit more expensive in the evenings but still very reliable.

Antica Taverna da Paolo & Viorica (Via Monte Giordano 23, tel 06 68801053, open every day) is down a back street off Governo Vecchio. Again this is real ‘Cucina Romana’, with good pasta and meat courses, all for very reasonable prices. There are a few outdoor tables with heating in the winter, and a busy following among locals.

Around the corner in the posh Via dei Coronari, full of smart shops, is the more upmarket Cantina del Vecchio (Coronari 30, tel 06 6867427). This lies in the heart of one of the swishest shopping streets in Rome. The menu is very impressive … and more expensive than local spots like those above. But this place is a wine bar too, with an exceptional selection of Italian reds and whites at very reasonable prices. Plus some evenings you will find free food on the counter from the restaurant kitchen… and it’s simply wonderful. I had a glass of beautiful Soave there for five euros a couple of weeks ago, and the barman happily piled up a plate of delightful cheeses and pates which I hadn’t even been expecting.

As always, Rome is full of surprises if you take the time to look and don’t follow the masses.