Roman Holidays

Romans don’t seem to make much of a fuss over Valentine's day. This proved a welcome relief from the somewhat over-commercialised version of the day that is now marked in the UK. Hence, we were able to find somewhere to eat easily enough in Rome on Wednesday, without discovering that every trattoria was suddenly full of candlelit tables for two. Only at the top of the Spanish Steps did we observe one of Rome’s legion of street vendors trying (without much luck) to sell individual red roses to courting couples.

Keats-Shelley house at the foot of the Spanish Steps

There is an irony here: not only is Rome one of the world’s great romantic cities, but St Valentine himself was a Roman. Little is known of who exactly he was, but Valentine may have been either a priest from Rome, or the Bishop of Terni who happened to be staying in the city (or indeed it is possible that both martyrs have somehow come to be known as St Valentine). Either way, a beheading on the Via Flaminia to the north of Rome, in the time of Emperor Claudius (around AD 269-73), is what is really being marked on 14 February. 

St Valentine's beheading

Not that there was any connection between such gruesome events and ideas of romantic love – that was a later, medieval, fabrication, perhaps contrived simply because the date helpfully coincides with the first signs of spring, when lovebirds start to choose their mates and so on. (As ever, I take my information here from the endlessly fascinating book by Steve Roud, The English Year.)

Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome

It turns out that being in Rome for February half-term also meant we were there for another even older date in the Roman ritual calendar: Lupercalia (15 February). Lupercalia was a festival of purification, and ought to be better remembered, not least because the name of the month derives from februum (meaning ‘purgings’). The Roman festival involved the priesthood of the Luperci sacrificing goats and a dog and then, blooded and naked, running through the streets around the Palatine Hill administering lashings with their ‘shaggy thongs’. Receiving such a lashing was said to boost the fertility of childless women. The festival was likely to be pre-Roman in date, and links back to the foundation myths of the city itself (Romulus and Remus suckling on the she-wolf, and all that). Not surprisingly, Rome’s early Christian leaders attempted to end all such rituals, though it would seem the festival continued to be marked for some time subsequently, even by those professing the Christian faith.  

Lupercalia

We did not see any evidence of Lupercalia being observed in the streets of modern-day Rome, as we searched (with some difficulty) for a reasonably priced lunch on the day we visited the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill. But we had been fortified in the morning by our trip to the Colosseum – a most amazing structure, where even the barest historical imagination is sufficient to bring the days of imperial Rome to life. It was said that the opening of the Colosseum in AD 80 was marked by a hundred consecutive days of games, during which 9,000 animals were slaughtered. The arena was built to hold 70,000 spectators and took 100,000 Jewish slaves to construct over a period of eight years from AD 72.

 

Colosseum

Another astonishing building we experienced was the 2,000-year-old Pantheon, built as a temple to all the gods but converted into a church in the 7^th century. The Pantheon’s dome is constructed of blocks made from poured concrete, thicker at the base (6m) than they are at the top (1m), where a 6m-diameter hole (the oculus) lets in sunlight and rainwater. 

The dome of the Pantheon, with oculus

The hole is integral to the entire construction, apparently, since the compression ring that lines it helps to redistribute the tensile forces that otherwise might bring the dome crashing down. As it is, the dome is the largest unreinforced concrete structure of its type anywhere in the world. The proportions are beautiful: the diameter of the rotunda (142.2 ft) is the same as the height to the oculus, meaning that the whole thing would sit in a perfect cube, or that it could contain a perfect sphere of 142.2 ft diameter.

Pantheon, Rome

The Pantheon continues to inspire engineers today, and no wonder that it was also an inspiration for 18^th-century travellers. One of these was Robert Adam, the Scottish architect who spent time in Rome imbibing the classicism of the architecture at places like the Pantheon and Colosseum. He wrote to his sister to say,

“Rome is the most glorious place in the universal world. A grandeur and tranquillity reigns in it, everywhere noble and striking remains of antiquity appear in it”.

As I learned at an excellent lecture given by Jeremy Musson the week before our trip (part of the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage celebrations), Adam’s particular inspiration was Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who depicted the Pantheon like this: 

Not far from where I live, Audley End house features a suite of rooms designed by Adam in the neoclassical style, when he was at the height of his fame after his return from Rome. How perfect therefore to travel such a distance to spend time in a foreign country, only to be better informed about one’s starting point. And that, surely, is the whole point of the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage (for more information, do visit european-heritage.co.uk).

 

Little Drawing Room, Audley End, from Jeremy Musson's book on Adam's interiors http://interiordesignmasterclass.com/robert-adam-country-house-design-decoration-the-art-of-elegance-from-rizzoli-new-york/