We Spend Some Time With the Queen – of Roads!

There’s been a lot of hubbub recently over British royalty, what with the coronation of the King and Queen last week. Here in Rome there are no longer monarchs of that sort. But we wanted to meet what royalty we could while we were here. So we visited the ‘Queen of Roads’ (‘Regina Viarum’) as the Roman poet Statius (45-96 CE) calls the Via Appia Antica.

The censor Appius Claudius Caecus (‘the Blind’) built the Appian Way aka the Via Appia in 312 BCE to join Rome with Capua to the south. He paved it only partway, but as time went by, later Romans extended both its paving and its length. By the mid-2nd century BCE it ran all the way from Rome to Brindisium (=Brindisi) on the east coast of Italy. That’s a distance of some 550 km (about 340 miles)! Brindisi, in antiquity as today, affords the most direct crossing via boat to Greece.

We were obviously not going to travel the entire length of the road. (Our friend Bob did, and wrote a great book about it!). So we made it a day trip. Our guidebook suggested three possible itineraries, short, medium, and long. Always preferring the golden mean, we opted for the second. So we started at the Villa of the Quintilii. It’s about 10 km/6 mi from Porta Capena in Rome (where the road begins). This villa is spectacular in size: in fact it is the largest on the outskirts of Rome.

It was the property of two Quintilius brothers who were important senators at Rome. Both were murdered around 182 CE by the evil emperor Commodus (ruled 177-192). He accused them of conspiring against him, but contemporaries thought he just wanted their house. And a spectacular house it is! The villa has extensive ruins, including at least two large gardens, a hippodrome (race course), baths, and residential quarters. There is also a small museum with a number of wonderful sculptures, coins, and other artworks.

We left the Villa to travel northwards, back towards Rome (downhill, because we’re clever like that). At this point the Appian Way is narrow and quiet, almost rural. We had a wonderful time walking along and having the nerdy time of our lives. Tombs line both sides of the road (it being a Roman habit to put tombs alongside major roads). Some of them still have sculptures depicting the dead. We discovered as well some spectacular modern villas (mansions, really) just off the road. These are not, of course, open to the public, but we peeped as much as we could.

The most spectacular thing we saw was the tomb of Caecilia Metella, the best preserved mausoleum on the whole road. She lived in the first century BCE and was possibly the daughter-in-law of the famous Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the wealthiest men of his time, who bankrolled the young Julius Caesar and later formed a political alliance with him and Pompey. You might know this as the first triumvirate.

The tomb shows how important the family was. It is a circular drum 30 metres (just shy of 100 feet) in diameter and rising to a height of 11 metres (36 feet). The top would have been covered with a cone-shaped mound of earth; today it is open to the elements. You can walk up to the dome and have a look inside. Caecilia herself is long gone, but they have a hologram of a figure who is supposed to be her telling you about her life and the monument. Somewhat jarring, but not ineffective. Around the whole complex (which has a medieval castle joined to it on one side) there are some beautiful sculptures and numerous inscriptions. Even in ruins, it is a very impressive site.

As we continued our way north on the Via Appia, we came to some of the famous catacombs that line it. Though they are usually associated with Christians, catacombs did not originate with them. Non-Christians first started building them because of the demands of space, once people no longer cremated their dead but buried them. We didn’t go into the catacombs but stopped in a small church in their midst, the Basilica of St Sebastian outside the Walls. Here we saw a superb marble sculpture by Bernini of St Sebastian, pierced by gold arrows. Alas, Bernini’s last work, his Salvator Mundi (‘Saviour of the World’, i.e., Christ), was not there. We have since learned that it is on temporary display at Fiumicino Airport (!) until mid-May.

At this point it was late in the day and our little pilgrim legs were getting tired. The road had become much wider closer in. And, perhaps thanks to the time, cars rushed about both ways (without much space to avoid them). Our initial quiet walk had turned into an urban outing! So we decided to take the bus the rest of the way back into Rome. We hope to get back to the Via Appia before we leave, but we still have so many things to see and so little time to see them.